Peter Bearman

Peter Bearman is Director of INCITE, Cole Professor of the Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program, OHMA, and the Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Training Program at Columbia University. A specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. A recipient of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman investigated the social determinants of the autism epidemic. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005). His work in oral history focuses on the technical government in Tunisia following their Arab Spring and the art scene around Robert Rauschenberg. He leads projects on the neural signatures of social relations, labor migration, and participates in exciting projects in computational social science. His most far-fetched, difficult, and longest-running project is “Rocky Road Day”, a cultural and social history of the United States over the last century and the focus of his Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.