James A. Evans

James A. Evans is a Professor at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Director of the Knowledge Lab and Faculty Director of the Masters Program in Computational Social Science. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research bridges computational methods with social theory to analyze collective cognition, innovation, and knowledge production across science, technology, and broader societal domains.

• Director, Knowledge Lab
• Faculty Director, Masters Program in Computational Social Science
• External Professor, Santa Fe Institute

Evans’s research explores how social and technical institutions shape discovery processes, utilizing machine learning, network modeling, and large-scale data analysis. His work spans fields like computational social science, sociology of science, and data science, focusing on team dynamics, peer review, and the global structure of scholarship.

His recent publications examine team size effects on innovation, discursive influence in academia, and the interplay between tradition and novelty in research strategies. Articles trend toward interdisciplinary approaches combining social theory, computational methods, and science policy.

Evans supports novel observatories for human understanding through crowdsourcing, sensor networks, and semantic modeling. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research, with findings featured in major media outlets like Nature, Science, and The New York Times.