Isabella Lopez
Duncan Watts has been named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Now in its sixth year, the goal of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program is to support high-caliber scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences that addresses important and enduring issues confronting our society. The selected projects focus on a broad range of complex political, economic, technological, humanistic, and sociological matters. Each fellowship carries a grant of $200,000.
The 2020 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows includes 27 scholars, out of more than 300 nominated candidates. The candidates’ proposals were initially evaluated by an anonymous team of prominent scholars, educators, and intellectuals, and the final selections were made by a distinguished panel of 17 jurors, including President Amy Gutmann.
Watts, a Penn Integrates Knowledge professor with appointments in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Wharton School, seeks to deepen our understanding of the origins, nature, and prevalence of misinformation, and its effects on democracy. Using a unique collection of datasets — including text from online news publishers; closed-caption text from local television news programs; and nationally representative panels of mobile, web, and TV content consumption — Watts and his collaborators at Penn, Microsoft Research, MIT, and Stanford will study how media produce information, how people consume that information, and how it influences public opinion and understanding.
Read more about Duncan Watts’ research and fellow Andrew Carnegie Fellowship recipients on Penn Today.