Damon Centola

Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology, and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Network Dynamics Group and serves as a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, he is a pioneering researcher in social networks, behavior change, and collective intelligence. He previously served on the faculty at MIT and as a fellow at Harvard University, and is the author of the best-selling Change: How to Make Big Things Happen and the award-winning How Behavior Spreads. Centola also holds a U.S. patent for inventing a network method to spread new ideas and beliefs online. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the James S. McDonnel Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, Facebook, PerBak Capital Partners, and the Hewlett Foundation, and his speaking and consulting clients include Amazon, Apple, Cigna, General Motors, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry's, the U.S. Army, and the NBA. Centola’s research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, and Scientific American. His forthcoming book, Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence, dispels the myth of ‘groupthink’ by presenting counterintuitive new theoretical and empirical findings that demonstrate why (and when) interacting crowds are far more intelligent than solitary individuals.