Duncan James Watts (born February 20, 1971) is a sociologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was formerly a

principal researcher Research is "creativity, creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular att ...

at Microsoft Research in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, and is known for his work on

small-world network A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and most nodes can be reached from every other node by a sm ...

Education

Watts received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degree in physics from the

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensiv ...

and a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

, where his advisor was

Steven Strogatz Steven Henry Strogatz (), born August 13, 1959, is an American mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study o ...

Career

Watts joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in July 2019 as a PIK Professor. He has joint appointments in Engineering, Communications and Business. Watts was past external faculty member of the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...

and a former professor of

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, where he headed the Collective Dynamics Group. He is also author of two books. His first, '' Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age'' is based on the six degrees research in his 1998 paper with

, in which the two presented a mathematical theory of the

small world phenomenon The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggeste ...

. His second book, ''Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us,'' explains common errors people make when making decisions especially for groups or organizations, and suggests alternative methods using research and data. He also presents some of his research from Yahoo and Microsoft, and comments on the work of some popular nonfiction writers like

Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published seven books: '' The Tipping Point: How Little ...

. Until April 2012, he was a principal research scientist at

Yahoo! Research Yahoo!, once one of the most popular web sites in the United States, is as of September 2021 a content sub-division of the namesake company Yahoo (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., owned by Apollo Global Management (90%) and Verizon Communications (10%) ...

, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. Watts joined Microsoft Research in New York City by its opening on May 3, 2012.Floridia, Richard
"Why Microsoft Chose New York City"
''The Atlantic: Cities'', 2 May 2012. Retrieved on 8 May 2012. Watts describes his research as exploring the "role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior, focusing on a few broad problem areas in social science such as information contagion, financial risk management, and organizational design."Home page of Duncan Watts at Yahoo Research
More recently he has attracted attention for his modern-day replication of Stanley Milgram's

small world experiment The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggest ...

using email messages and for his studies of popularity and fads in on-line and other communities. In Watts's early career, from 2002 to 2007, he was a frequent collaborator of

Peter Sheridan Dodds Peter Sheridan Dodds is an Australian applied Mathematician. He is the director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center and Professor at the University of Vermont's Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He has collaborated in several researche ...

, now at the University of Vermont's Vermont Complex Systems Center.

References

External links

Duncan Watts page at Microsoft
{{DEFAULTSORT:Watts, Duncan J. 1971 births Living people Australian physicists Australian sociologists Columbia University faculty Complex systems scientists Cornell University alumni University of New South Wales alumni Network scientists