Carl Bergstrom

Carl Bergstrom studies the flow of information.

Within biology, he studies how communication evolves and how the process of evolution encodes information in genomes.

In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how norms and institutions influence scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world.

Within informatics, he studies how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature.

Finally and perhaps most urgently, he studies how digital information technologies including social media and generative AI influence our ability to make collective sense of the world—and to make collective decisions based on that understanding.

Carl Bergstrom is a Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in evolutionary biology and mathematical population genetics, Carl is perhaps best known for working crossing field boundaries and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. He is the coauthor of the college textbook Evolution (W.W. Norton), and the Random House trade book Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.