Welcome to my personal homepage!

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biostatistics, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University. I am interested in a broad range of theoretical and applied problems in network science. My current research focuses on the statistical and mathematical analysis and modeling of social networks and their connection to human health; metrics and methods for network analysis; network theory; and online social systems and social media.

Prior to joining the Department of Biostatistics, I spent two years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Christakis. Before that I worked at the Harvard Kennedy School for one year as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar with Professor David Lazer. I earlier held a Research Fellowship at Oxford University for two years, a position that was joint between the Department of Physics and the Said Business School, where my mentor was Professor Felix Reed-Tsochas. I'm also a CABDyN Associate Fellow and an Associate Fellow at the Said Busines School.

I obtained my Ph.D. at Helsinki University of Technology (now called Aalto University) in 2006. My doctoral dissertation "Complex Networks in the Study of Financial and Social Systems" received the Dissertation of the Year Award from the university. The dissertation can be summarized as a haiku (which, regrettably, has not received any prize yet):

Common network structures?
Sometimes there,
in markets and in people too.

I also have a faculty profile and a faculty webpage. I'm jponnela on Twitter.