Tina Eliassi-Rad - A master class in network thinking and the kind of life it makes

Tina Eliassi-Rad is a network thinker, a network science pioneer, and an intrepid explorer of where network science shows up in our world and how we understand that. Her work, as her life, falls across network science, complexity, artificial intelligence, and commitments to democracy and equality, itself a constellation of experiences and literacies befitting our increasingly complex world.

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Tina Eliassi-Rad is a Professor of Computer Science and President Joseph E. Aoun Chair at Northeastern University, where she leads research at the intersection of data mining, machine learning, and network science. She is also a core faculty member at Northeastern's Network Science Institute and the Institute for Experiential AI.

As an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vermont Complex Systems Center, she has used the ideas of network science to alter how we think about and represent complex systems.

Across experiences at Northeastern and Rutgers and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before them, she has accumulated hundreds of revered publications and innumerable invited presentations. Her profound work has garnered her numerous awards, including being named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021, receiving Northeastern University's Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award in 2022, and being elected Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2023.

Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (with a minor in Mathematical Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Network thinking is a core competency for anyone living today and one only growing more central with our linked society. It is a perspective that has constellated many of the individuals we have had on this show, shown up in countless of these conversations in different context and exhilarating diversity. But few of these guests enjoy more experience, more work and thinking at the frontier of the very discipline that attempts to understand networks, network science, than Tina.

So this is a conversation about network science. But it is also a conversation about the way in which networks define our lives and our societies. It is about thinking in networks and where that sensibility leads a life and what it reveals about our world.