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Peter Dodds
Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center at University of Vermont
Peter Sheridan Dodds is a prominent figure in the field of complex systems and data science, currently serving as the Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center (VCSC) at the University of Vermont (UVM).
Background and Education
Dodds is originally from rural Australia and has a diverse educational background, having studied at the University of Melbourne, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. His formal training encompasses physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, and the Earth and life sciences.135
Academic and Research Roles
- He is a Full Professor at the University of Vermont, appointed to the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
- Co-Director of the Computational Story Lab, where he collaborates closely with Chris Danforth.
- He has led the development of a graduate program in Complex Systems and Data Science at UVM, offering Certificate, Master's, and PhD levels since 2018.136
Research Interests
Dodds's research focuses on system-level problems across various fields, including sociology, physics, language, stories, sociotechnical systems, Earth sciences, biology, and ecology. His work involves large-scale data collection and analysis, sociotechnical experiments, and the development of theoretical models. Key areas of interest include:
- Contagion and social networks
- Language and meaning
- Stories and their emotional arcs
- Hedonometrics, which involves measuring happiness through large-scale data, such as Twitter sentiment analysis.135
Notable Contributions
- Developed the "Hedonometer," a tool that measures happiness and sentiment through social media data. This tool has been used to identify significant emotional trends, such as determining the saddest day recorded based on Twitter data.3
- Created and teaches the online course "Principles of Complex Systems" (Volumes 1 and 2), a two-semester graduate course available freely online.1
- Published numerous papers on topics such as public opinion formation, social networks, and the geography of happiness, many of which have been highly cited.23
Funding and Collaborations
Dodds has received funding from various organizations including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the MITRE Corporation, MassMutual, and Google. He was awarded an NSF CAREER grant by the Social and Economic Sciences Directorate.1
His LinkedIn profile can be found under the username petersheridandodds.4