Professor Brian Castellani, PhD, FAcSS

Director of the Durham Research Methods Centre

Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology

In addition to being Director of the DRMC, I am Co-Director of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry (Northeastern Ohio Medical University), Editor of the Routledge Complexity in Social Science series, CO-I for the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Social Sciences.

I am trained as a public health sociologist, clinical psychologist, and methodologist and take a transdisciplinary approach to my work. My methodological focus is primarily on computational modelling and mixed-methods. My colleagues and I have spent the past ten years developing a new case-based, data mining approach to modelling complex social systems and social complexity – case-based computational modelling – which we have used to help researchers, policy evaluators, and public sector organisations address a variety of complex public health issues, from depression and allostatic load to air pollution and brain health to the social determinants of health inequalities.

We also developed COMPLEX-IT, designed to increase non-expert access to the tools of computational social science (i.e., cluster analysis, artificial intelligence, data visualization, data forecasting, and scenario simulation) to make better sense of the complex world(s) in which they live and work. As Director of the DRMC, my goal is to facilitate across the university a transdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach to social and health science, grounded in a complex systems perspective.

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• Staff Profile
• Contact Professor Brian Castellani