Aaron Clauset

Aaron Clauset develops computational tools to understand and predict the structure and dynamics of complex social and biological systems. His research program is fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing broadly on techniques and theories that span network science, machine learning, ecology and evolutionary biology, and political science and sociology. Clauset received a B.S. in physics with honors from Haverford College, and a Ph.D. in computer science with distinction from the University of New Mexico. He then held a prestigious Omidyar Fellowship with the Santa Fe Institute. There, he developed advanced computational methods to explore a diverse array of scientific topics, including the macroevolution of biological species, the statistics of scale invariance, and the hierarchical organization of networks.

Dr. Clauset was recruited to the BioFrontiers Institute as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science in 2010. His research at BioFrontiers focuses on two broad areas: (i) understanding how interactions at smaller scales within a complex biological or social system drive regularities and dynamics at larger scales, and (ii) developing advanced machine learning techniques to automatically characterize such large-scale regularities and connect them with causal mechanisms at smaller scales or exploit them to make predictions. In recent work, Dr. Clauset has focused on these themes in the context of understanding the role of the tumor micro-environment in the pathology of high-grade serous carcinoma, the most common type of ovarian cancer, in developing new methods for identifying genomic structural variants, and in developing advanced methods for predicting missing links complex networks. In collaboration with Dr. Daniel B. Larremore (CS and BioFrontiers), the Clauset lab has also investigated statistical regularities in researcher career trajectories, scientific productivity, and the spread of scientific ideas. These diverse efforts are united by a fundamental interest in the use of computation and data to understand the underlying structure of complex biological and social systems.

Aaron Clauset is an internationally recognized leader in computational data science and network science. At Colorado, he is affiliated faculty in the departments of Information Science (INFO), Applied Mathematics (APPM), and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EBIO). He received an NSF CAREER award in 2015, and was named a Kavli Fellow in 2014 and a Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2023. He was awarded the international Erdős–Rényi Prize in Network Science in 2016. Since 2017, he has been a Deputy Editor responsible for the Social, Computing, and Interdisciplinary Sciences at the journal Science Advances. Dr. Clauset’s work has been covered extensively in the media, which highlights his work in developing practical solutions to real-world problems.