Damon Centola is a Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group.

He is a leading world expert on social networks and behavior change. His work has been published in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Sociology, Circulation and Journal of Statistical Physics. Damon received the American Sociological Association’s Award for Outstanding Research in Mathematical Sociology in 2006, 2009, and 2011; the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment, and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN. His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Heart Association, the National Academies, the U.S. Army and the NBA.

Before coming to Penn, Damon was an Assistant Professor at M.I.T. and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press, and the author of How Behavior Spreads, and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen.

How Behavior Spreads presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior--in voting, health, technology, and finance—occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Damon Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions that accelerate the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors. How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.

Drawing researchers from across departments and universities, the Network Dynamics Group consists of physicists, social scientists, and physicians using mathematical models and online empirical methods to study collective behavior. Research in the group focuses on how social and institutional changes can have unexpected effects on collective political, economic, and health outcomes.