Professor Keegan is a computational social scientist, an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and director of the CUPIDS Lab. He holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Computer Science and is an affiliate of the ATLAS Institute, Institute for Behavioral Research, American Politics Research Lab, and REACH.
His research uses digital traces of social behavior to explore how disruptions illuminate the emergence, stabilization, and dissolution of collaborative social structures. Online social platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Twitter once provided rich and open data about social behavior during disruptive events involving current events, controversies, and collective attention. With the enclosure of many of these data sources to train AI models, Keegan’s research has shifted to public interest data science.
Professor Keegan has taught “Information Expositions” for eight years, served as Vice Chair of one of the nation’s first cannabis licensing boards, and writes a data-driven column “Charting Boulder” for the Boulder Reporting Lab. CUPIDS is the synthesis of that research, teaching, and civic work.
Before joining CU Boulder, he was a research associate and data scientist at the Harvard Business School Online initiative (2014–2016) and a post-doctoral research fellow with Professor David Lazer at Northeastern University (2012–2014). Keegan received his Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2012 where he was co-advised by Professors Noshir Contractor and Darren Gergle. He received S.B. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. He was born in southern Oregon and grew up in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas. He is married and has two sons.
- Email: brian.keegan@colorado.edu
- GitHub: github.com/brianckeegan/