Mason Porter

Mason Porter was born in Los Angeles, California, USA. He earned a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 1998 and a Ph.D. from the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University in 2002. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Georgia Tech, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Caltech before joining the faculty in the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford in 2007. In 2016, he moved to the Department of Mathematics at UCLA, where he is currently a professor. Mason has numerous research interests in the theory and applications of complex systems. Some of these interests are network analysis, dynamical processes on networks, opinion dynamics, mathematical modeling of social systems, and topological data analysis. Mason is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, the American Physical Society, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His mentorship of undergraduates has been recognized by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Faculty Mentoring Award (Advanced Career Category; Mathematics and Computer Science Division). Additionally, 24 students thus far have earned their doctoral degrees under Mason's mentorship. Mason's Erdős number has an upper bound of 3.