Christopher A. Bail
Education
Ph.D., sociology, Harvard University
Summary of Experience
Professor Bail is widely recognized for his work in computational social science, which uses tools from data science to predict human behavior. His work leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to examine substantive issues ranging from social media to consumer protection, bot detection, and digital forensics. Professor Bail’s research has led to new social media products and informed government legislation on the regulation of the technology sector in the US and internationally. He has served as an expert witness in litigation concerning a major social media company. Professor Bail’s work has been published in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as profiled in several media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, NBC Nightly News, and the BBC. He is also the editor of the Oxford University Press Series in Computational Social Science. Professor Bail is the founder of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science and helped launch Duke University’s interdisciplinary data science master’s program. He is a Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow and has been awarded the Science Breakthrough of the Year Award by the Falling Walls Foundation. Prior to joining the Duke faculty, Professor Bail was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar at the University of Michigan, as well as a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the National Foundation of Political Science at Sciences Po.