David Lazer

Last updated
David Lazer
Alma mater University of Michigan
Wesleyan University
Known for Computational Social Science
Scientific career
Fields Political Science
Computer and Information Science
Institutions Northeastern University
Harvard University
Princeton University
Website davidlazer.com

David Lazer is a distinguished professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University, as well as the co-director of the NULab of Texts, Maps, and Networks.

Northeastern University Private university in Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Northeastern University is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, established in 1898. It is categorized as an R1 institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus in the Fenway-Kenmore, Roxbury, South End, and Back Bay neighborhoods of Boston. The university has satellite campuses in Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle, Washington; San Jose, California; and Toronto, Canada, that exclusively offer graduate degrees. Northeastern recently purchased the New College of the Humanities in London and plans to open an additional campus in Vancouver, Canada. The university's enrollment is approximately 18,000 undergraduate students and 8,000 graduate students.

Contents

Life

Early life and education

David Lazer obtained a bachelor of arts in economics in 1988 from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He subsequently received his Ph.D. in political science in 1996 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. [1]

Career

Lazer's first academic position after graduate school was as a lecturer at Princeton University's Department of Politics, where he taught from 1996 to 1998. In 1998 he became an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and was promoted to associate professor in 2003. Lazer left Harvard in 2009 to join the faculty at Northeastern University, where he received dual-appointments in the Department of Political Science and the College of Computer and Information Science. Lazer was promoted to full professor in 2012 and to distinguished professor in 2014. [1]

Areas of research

Lazer is particularly well known for his research on computational social science, stemming from his 2009 article "Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science". [2]

Computational social science refers to the academic sub-disciplines concerned with computational approaches to the social sciences. This means that computers are used to model, simulate, and analyze social phenomena. Fields include computational economics, computational sociology, cliodynamics, culturomics, and the automated analysis of contents, in social and traditional media. It focuses on investigating social and behavioral relationships and interactions through social simulation, modeling, network analysis, and media analysis.

Lazer has published numerous articles on elections in the United States. One study he co-authored in 2010 found that Americans are more willing to deliberate with congressional leaders than had previously been expected. [3]

United States Federal republic in North America

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country comprising 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City. Most of the country is located contiguously in North America between Canada and Mexico.

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References

  1. 1 2 "David Lazer | Professor in Political Science and Computer and Information Science". davidlazer.com. Retrieved 2017-03-07.
  2. Lazer, David; Pentland, Alex; Adamic, Lada; Aral, Sinan; Barabási, Albert-László; Brewer, Devon; Christakis, Nicholas; Contractor, Noshir; Fowler, James (2009-02-06). "Computational Social Science". Science. 323 (5915): 721–723. doi:10.1126/science.1167742. ISSN   0036-8075. PMC   2745217 . PMID   19197046.
  3. Neblo, M., Esterling, K., Kennedy, R., Lazer, D., & Sokhey, A. (2010). Who wants to deliberate - and why?. AmericanPolitical Science Review, 104(3), 566-583. doi: 10.1017/S0003055410000298