Justin Weltz
Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow
Justin Weltz is a statistician from New York, NY interested in developing new methods for studying dynamic processes on social networks.
At the Santa Fe Institute, Justin hopes to apply his research in network sampling to analyze the social structures of communities studied through the Economic Networks and the Dynamics Of Wealth (ENDOW) project. He plans to design the statistical methods necessary for testing theories of wealth inequality using this cross-cultural anthropological study.
Justin holds a PhD from the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. At Duke, he focused on designing methods to collect information on populations that are understudied and underserved by the public health community. These “hard-to-reach” populations - including people who inject drugs, people who are undocumented, and people who are unhoused - often cannot be sampled through conventional survey methods to preserve their safety and anonymity.
For his dissertation, Justin built on network sampling techniques commonly used by sociologists. He formulated a reinforcement learning method for optimizing data collection and health interventions on the social networks of hard-to-reach populations. At the Santa Fe Institute, he will extend ideas explored during this work to model the coevolution of wealth and social network structure.