Lunch and discussion begin at 12:30 p.m. No RSVP required from current Princeton faculty, staff, and students. Open to members of the public by invitation only. Please contact Jean Butcher at if you are interested in attending a particular lunch.

The digital age has transformed how researchers are able to study social behavior. These new opportunities mean that the future of social research will involve blending together insights from two communities: social scientists and data scientists. In this talk, Salganik will begin by describing what he thinks each community has to contribute and what each community has to learn. Then, he’ll focus on this social science/data science hybrid in one particular domain where he sees a lot of opportunities: survey research. The talk will conclude with some predictions about the future of social research.

Bio:

Matthew Salganik is a professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is the author Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, http://www.bitbybitbook.com/, and his research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association, and he received the Leo Goodman Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Sloan Foundation, Facebook, and Google. During sabbaticals from Princeton, he has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech and a Senior Research are Microsoft Research.