Zeynep Tufekci

I'm an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I've completed my Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. I am fascinated by how technology and society co-evolve. I’m currently looking into the social and cultural impacts of social computing. I’m particularly interested in community dynamics, surveillance and privacy, and the transformation of characteristics of human sociality as it becomes increasingly mediated by technology. My dissertation focused on on the digital divide and gender, race and social class. I’m also interested in the emerging cluster of new approaches to social data analysis — many people refer to these as complex systems methods. I think these methods hold great promise for tackling many core sociological questions. I think that agent-based modeling, network analysis and statistical methods used in the natural sciences to tackle systems with large number of interacting parts (i.e. statistical mechanics) could offer a lot to the