Joseph Bak-Coleman is a computational social scientist whose research explores how collectives make decisions in the face of uncertainty, with a particular focus on the impact of digital technologies on collective behavior.
He is currently a Research Scientist at the University of Washington, an External Applied Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, an Affiliate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, and a Collaboration Partner at the University of Konstanz's Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour. His research spans topics including misinformation, polarization, and the development of evidence-based technology policy, with publications in Nature, Science Advances, and PNAS. He is also the co-author of the forthcoming book Of Fish and Fascists, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2027. Before his current role, Bak-Coleman served as a Consulting Expert for the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Reports Office and as an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University's Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security. He earned his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2020, where he worked with Iain Couzin and Dan Rubenstein, before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public. Over the past decade, his research has examined decision-making in human and animal collectives, from fish schools and zebra herds to social media users and scientists.
