George Mason University - Ph.D Program in Computational Social SciencesThe core objective of the Ph.D. program in Computational Social Science is to train graduate students to be professional computational social scientists in academia, government or business. Our program offers students a unique and innovative interdisciplinary academic environment for systematically exploring, discovering, and developing their skills to successfully follow careers in one of the areas of computational social science.
Examples of areas of concentrations and potential specializations include but are not limited to the following:
- Agent-based computational economics: trade, finance, decision-making under risk
- Computational political economy: voting, institutions, norms, inequality
- Computational linguistics: generative grammars, parsing, classifiers, inference
- Social network analysis: connectivity, structure, evolution of the WWW, cyberwarfare
- Computational anthropology: emergence of hierarchy, settlement patterns
- Computational political science: systems of government, conflict and war, cooperation
- Computational sociology: segregation, collective action, leadership, trust
- Complexity theory: power laws, potential theory, criticality, bifurcation
- Computational methodology: multi-agent systems, evolutionary computation, UML, GIS, visualization, sonification, computational epistemology
Admission Requirements and ProceduresThe application deadline is February 1st of each year for students seeking financial aid, or April 1 for all other students.
Applicants should have as background a bachelor's degree in either one of the social sciences, in computer science, engineering, or in a relevant discipline, as well as undergraduate courses in these and related areas. Bachelor's degrees in the physical or biological sciences are also eligible, but applicant may be advised to take additional courses in social science or computer science as prerequisites to admission. Minimal requirements also include one undergraduate course in calculus and knowledge of a computer programming language preferably object-based. While in the program students are expected to develop significant expertise in the utilization of computational social science resources such as agent-based simulations or other computational tools. The program maintains a simulation environment, the Multi-Agent Simulator of Neighborhoods and Networks (
MASON), in collaboration with the Evolutionary Computation Laboratory (
EC Lab) of the Department of Computer Science. Mathematics training beyond basic calculus is not required, but may be useful in some areas of specialization.
For more information, please see
http://www.css.gmu.edu/Online applications can be submitted to
http://admissions.gmu.edu/grad/.