Damon Centola named 2026 Guggenheim Fellow
The Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering is among the 223 people chosen for the Guggenheim’s 101st class of Fellows.
Damon Centola, the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named a 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. He is among 223 people working across 55 disciplines chosen from nearly 5,000 applicants in this 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, and he is one of just three awardees to receive the Fellowship in the category of sociology.
Centola is director of the Network Dynamics Group at Annenberg and is a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn. His research centers on social networks and behavior change. His work has received numerous scientific awards, including the Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology in 2011; the James Coleman Award for Outstanding Research in Rationality and Society in 2017; and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019.
He was a developer of the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment and was awarded a U.S. patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a member of the Sci Foo community and fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press and the author of “How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions” and “Change: How to Make Big Things Happen.” His new book, "Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence," is due out in October.
Founded in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowship was created by Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon. The award is designed to support a project lasting six to 12 months and to allow fellows to pursue independent work at the highest level under the “freest possible conditions,” according to the foundation.
