Damon Centola, PhD, is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Network Dynamics Group. A leading expert on social networks, collective intelligence, and behavior change, his research explores disease outbreaks, political polarization, bias reduction in medical communities, and the emergence of social tipping points. He helped develop the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment and holds a U.S. patent for a method to promote diffusion in online networks.
Dr. Centola is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Facebook, John Templeton Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and Hewlett Foundation. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (Princeton University Press, 2018), Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (Little, Brown Spark, 2021), and Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence (MIT Press / Penguin Random House, 2026).
Before joining Penn, Dr. Centola was a professor at MIT and a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University. His speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cigna, the National Academies, the U.S. Army, and the NBA. His work has been featured by the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and CNN.
