Justin Weltz

Justin Weltz is a statistician from New York, NY interested in developing new methods for studying dynamic processes on social networks. He holds a PhD from the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University.

At Duke, Justin focused on designing methods to collect information on populations that are understudied and underserved by the public health community. These “hard-to-reach” populations - including people who inject drugs, people who are undocumented, and people who are unhoused - often must be sampled through non-conventional survey methods to preserve their safety and anonymity.

For his dissertation, Justin built on network sampling techniques commonly used by sociologists. He formulated a reinforcement learning method for optimizing data collection and health interventions on the social networks of hard-to-reach populations.

At the Santa Fe Institute, he hopes to apply his research in network sampling to analyze the social structures of communities studied through the Economic Networks and the Dynamics Of Wealth (ENDOW) project. Justin will leverage this cross-cultural anthropological study to design the statistical methods necessary for testing theories about wealth inequality. This will involve extending his previous work through modeling the coevolution of wealth and social network structure.