Matthew J. Salganik


Matthew Jeffrey Salganik is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at Princeton University, with a special interest on social networks and computational social science.

Academic career

Salganik was hired by Princeton in 2007, and promoted from assistant professor to full professor in 2013. Salganik is also affiliated with interdisciplinary research centers at Princeton, such as the Office for Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. Salganik received his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Emory University in 1998. He proceeded to get his master's degree in sociology at Cornell University in 2003, where he also lived in the Telluride House. He finished his Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University in 2007.
His research has been previously funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Programs for HIV/AIDS, Russell Sage Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Facebook, and Google.

Publications

Salganik published his first book Bit by Bit, on December 5, 2017, in which he explores the birth and spread of social media and other technological advancements and how this has ultimately changed the way social scientists can collect and process data on human behavior.
Other publications include articles in Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Journal Economist, and The New Yorker.

Awards

Salganik won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association in 2005. He won the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association in 2008.