Peter Dodds

Peter Sheridan Dodds is a Full Professor at the University of Vermont (UVM) working on system-level problems in many fields, ranging from sociology to physics. He is Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center, co-Director of the Computational Story Lab, and is appointed to the Department of Computer Science. Originally from farmland in rural Australia, Dodds's education tracked through the University of Melbourne, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University, with formal training in physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, the Earth and life sciences, and extensive postdoctoral and research experience in the social sciences. He maintains general research and teaching interests in complex systems and networks with a focus on sociotechnical and psychological phenomena including contagion, language, meaning, and stories. His methods have encompassed large-scale data collection and analysis, large-scale sociotechnical experiments, building measuring instruments for data-rich complex systems, and the formulation, analysis, and simulation of theoretical models. Dodds has received funding from NSF, NASA, ONR, the MITRE Corporation, MassMutual, and Google, and was awarded an NSF CAREER grant by the Social and Economic Sciences Directorate. In 2007, Dodds created and has continually evolved Principles of Complex Systems (Volumes 1 and 2), a two-semester graduate course that is freely and fully online. At UVM, Dodds has led the organic development of a highly successful, scaffolded graduate program in Complex Systems and Data Science, offering three levels: Certificate, Masters, and, as of 2018, PhD.