Congratulations to Professors Vanina Leschziner and Dan Silver for receiving the Catalyst Grant from the Data Science Institute for their upcoming research project on understanding social influence within social media. Leschziner and Silver are co-principal investigators with principal investigator Professor Peter Marbach of the computer science department. The project is part of a new interdisciplinary collaboration between the two departments.
The total amount of the Catalyst Award is $100,000, which will fund the project over the course of two years. Their goal is to broaden the scope of social influence analysis by examining the structure of social influence and its role in exacerbating and/or creating new forms of social inequality. The research team aims to understand how social influence takes form within the structures of social media platforms.
The results from this project have the potential to contribute to sociological theory, including in sub-fields such as social network analysis, organizational behavior, and field theory.