PJ Lamberson

PJ Lamberson is an Associate Professor in the Communication Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), serving as departmental Vice Chair and Director of Graduate Studies since 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University (2006) and has held prior faculty positions at MIT Sloan School of Management and the Kellogg School of Management, where he also served as Associate Director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His research focuses on social influence, networks, and collective intelligence, with interdisciplinary applications in political science, epidemiology, and computational social science.

**Education**: B.A. Mathematics (University of Chicago, 2001), M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Mathematics (Columbia University, 2003–2006). He has received funding from NIH, UCLA, and other institutions for projects like "Team Dynamics, Networks, and Assembly (Team DNA)" ($1.7M) and "Network Games with Local Correlation and Clustering" ($5K).

**Research Interests**: Explores how individual interactions aggregate into collective outcomes, including social contagion, network structures, and hybrid predictive systems. Recent work addresses voter turnout dynamics, obesity prevention via agent-based models, and optimal networks for problem-solving.

**Awards**: IC2S2 Best Paper Award (2021), multiple Faculty Impact Awards (2013–2014), and recognition for contributions to teaching and interdisciplinary research.

**Teaching**: Offers courses like Computational Communication (PhD), Social Networking (undergraduate), and Methodologies of Communication Research. Supervised over a dozen PhD and master’s students, including Gülşah Akçakır and Seonhye Noh.

**Professional Roles**: Associate Editor of *System Dynamics Review*, contributor to international conferences, and frequent speaker on topics like computational social science and network theory.