Santo Fortunato, a professor in the School of Informatics and Computing, has been named a scientific director of the Indiana University Network Science Institute.
The mission of IUNI is to strengthen the theories, methods, analytic tools, and practice of network science, and to foster collaborative, interdisciplinary network science approaches to understanding and improving the complex challenges of our world.
Fortunato is a member of SoIC’s complex systems unit and is excited for SoIC to serve a managing role in the institute given the amount of research in network science that happens in the institute.
“Network science is a critical and growing part of our research mission at SoIC,” Fortunato says. “The IUNI is dedicated to advancing the field and creating the innovative methods and services that will make the study of network science more available to a wider audience.”
Fortunato joins faculty from across campus, including Executive Director Patrice L. Mabry (Public Health) and science directors Bernice Psecosolido (Sociology), Andy Saykin (School of Medicine), and Olaf Sporns (Psychological and Brain Sciences), in the leadership of IUNI.
IUNI works to accomplish its mission by:
- Facilitating collaborative, high-impact research projects in network science in any topical area, especially those projects requiring participation from multiple disciplines;
- Developing and improving network science methods and tools to enhance capabilities of the broader research community;
- Enabling interdisciplinary research by collecting, preserving, standardizing and providing access to secure data, analytic tools, and high performance computing resources;
- Providing information technology expertise and staff to develop the needed infrastructure to support network science tools and platforms;
- Developing educational opportunities for the research community to learn about network science;
- Enhancing the scientific rigor in the field by developing best practices related to network science
- Hosting lectures, workshops, workgroups and other activities aimed and fostering collaboration among IU faculty interested in applying network sciences approaches in their research; and
- Leading scientific discourse in network science through support of scholarly works and hosting of network science meetings and conferences.
Additional SoIC faculty working with IUNI include Distinguished Professor Katy Börner, Associate Professor Alessandro Flammini, Professor Fil Menczer, and Postdoctoral Fellow Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia. Several additional SoIC faculty are among the 165 researchers affiliated with the institute.