Network Investigator: Barry Wellman

Contact Information

• S. D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC
• NetLab Director
• Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
• Toronto, Canada M5S 2J4
• tel: 1.416.978.8263
• fax: 1.416.978.3963
• mailto:[email protected]
• http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

GRAND Projects

• Accessibility of New Media for Disabled, Elderly, and Vulnerable Individuals
• Digital Infrastructures: Access and Use in the Networked Society
• Developing Methods for Evaluation of Virtual Worlds & Understanding User Experiences
• Network Assessment and Validation for Effective Leadership
• Usable Privacy and Security for New Media Environments

Biography

Barry Wellman’s NetLab at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto studies the intersection of social networks, computer networks and communication networks. Wellman holds an endowed chair from the University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has won career achievement awards from the Canadian Sociological Association, the International Network for Social Network Analysis (an organization of 1200 scholars that he founded), and two sections of the American Sociological Association: Communication and Information Technologies; Community and Urban Sociology. In 2008, he was the first winner of the International Communication Association’s “Communication as an Open Field” Award for a researcher who has “made important contributions to the field of communications from outside the discipline of communications.” He received his PhD from Harvard in 1969.

Wellman’s NetLab contains 23 scholars, ranging from faculty in Canada and the United States, through postdocs and graduate students, to undergraduates and a high school intern. One NetLab member won a Rhodes Scholarship in 2008. Wellman himself has edited three books and written more than 200 scholarly papers, often in collaboration. A book and several papers have been prize-winning. Wellman's most recent book was The Internet in Everyday Life. Wellman has collaborated with computer scientists, information scientists, communication scientists in the analysis and design of computer systems -- as well as with a historian and a psychiatrist. He is presently writing a book, Networked, for MIT Press, with Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. His work is currently funded by the Intel Corp. SSHRCC and Pew. Previous funders include AMD, Bell Canada, IBM, Nokia and Nortel.

Wellman’s main projects now include “Connected Lives” (Toronto) and “Connected Lives North" (northern Ontario), analyzing the interplay of communication, social capital, relationships and community involvement on and off the Internet. He has also recently studied networks of distributed work in Canada and the United States.