David Lazer

Research interests

• Computational social science
• Network science
• Collective cognition
• Political networks and deliberative democracy
• Social media and social influence in networks
• Predictive modeling

Education

• PhD in Political Science, University of Michigan
• BA in Economics, Wesleyan University

Biography

David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern University, jointly appointed between the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Lazer is interested in computational social science and social networks, with a focus on misinformation and political communication. He co-directs the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern's center for digital humanities and computational social science. He is co-lead of the COVID states project — which charted public opinion in all 50 states through the pandemic — as well as the co-founder of Volunteer Science, a citizen science project to study human behavior. Lazer is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a visiting scholar at the Harvard University's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Lazer's work has been covered by hundreds of news outlets, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and the American Political Science Review. His most recent book, "Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy," authored with Michael Neblo and Kevin Esterling, examines potential reforms to improve the deliberative potential of US democracy.

Lazer has been the principal investigator on more than $13 million of grants from the NSF, ARL, ARO, IARPA, and other entities. He has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, and as a member of numerous other editorial boards and program committees.

Projects

Recent publications