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Causes
Capabilities
Predictive science for global health
We develop data-driven models and analytical tools to forecast, mitigate, and manage the spread of infectious diseases and other complex societal threats. By combining network science, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence, we deliver real-time insights that support public health response, policy decisions, and global resilience.
Our capabilities +
- Epidemic Forecasting & Simulation Platforms: Tools to anticipate contagion dynamics at local, national, and global scales.
- Early Warning & Surveillance Systems: AI-integrated systems combining real-world data, mobility patterns, and syndromic signals.
- Decision Support for Health Systems: Strategic modeling to guide hospital surge capacity, workforce planning, and resource allocation.
- Impact of environmental factors on health: Study of how environmental factors shape patterns of infectious disease and influence the incidence of antibiotic resistance.
- Scenario Modeling for Policy & Risk Assessment: Custom simulations to evaluate interventions, vaccine strategies, and behavioral responses.
- Digital Epidemiology: Leveraging high-resolution mobility, behavioral data, and social sensing to capture population-level trends.
Proven impact +
- COVID-19 Pandemic: Helped shape national pandemic response through real-time forecasting and scenario modeling.
- Respiratory Virus Forecasting Hubs: Leading roles in U.S. and European networks coordinating multi-model ensemble forecasts.
- Wastewater Surveillance: Developing analytic platforms to integrate genomic and environmental signals for pathogen detection.
Actionable urban intelligence
Rapidly evolving urban landscapes, businesses and communities require sophisticated data, predictive analytics, and a deep understanding of human behavior to thrive. We use advanced analytical methods and large-scale datasets to understand the complex dynamics of cities, providing insights that drive economic growth and optimize operations and policies.
Our capabilities +
- Urban human behavior models and analytics: Use anonymized mobility and activity data to create accurate models of people’s behaviors, identifying patterns of activity, popular locations, and the impact of transportation.
- Economic risk prediction: How human behavior and mobility shape the economic health of cities and the connections between businesses, and the flow of value across urban networks.
- Identification of community inclusivity factors: How urban design and infrastructure affect social mixing between customers and groups in cities.
- Labor market analysis: Impact of AI, upskilling, and job transitions on career mobility, wages, and the labor market in major cities and companies
- Policy and impacts evaluation: Cutting-edge spatial and behavioral causal techniques to analyze how policy interventions or commercial developments affect people’s and customers' behaviors.
- Urban health environments analysis: Measure how access to health, food, and public services influences community well-being and long-term health outcomes.
Real-world applications +
- Retail & real estate: Identify optimal locations, forecast foot traffic, assess business resilience, and predict customer behavior at the micro-level.
- Public health: Analyze the impact of food environments, identify risk factors, inform public health policy, optimize interventions.
- Human resources: Understand urban labor market trends, improve career development, and optimize talent acquisition.
- Urban planning & development: Create more resilient and vibrant urban environments, optimize social infrastructure. Evaluate transportation, zoning, or development interventions.
Optimizing organizations through Team Science & AI
Team composition and configuration are critical in high-stakes environments, where unsuccessful collaborations can cause significant setbacks and costs. We combine rigorous statistical methods, with insights from social science, network science, and machine learning to design effective teams, evaluate leadership models and support the deployment of AI to enhance the Collective Intelligence of groups. Our expertise in red-teaming, and experimental design helps leaders align strategy with innovation ensuring resilient collaboration, reduced risk, and measurable performance gains.
Our capabilities +
- High-impact teams design: Build adaptive teams for complex problem-solving or high-stakes environments, with a focus on atypical teams for long-term collaboration success.
- Leadership models: Impact analysis of various leadership arrangements, from co-leaders to larger configurations, on teamwork process and performance.
- AI-augmented Collective Intelligence: Boost productivity and strengthen a group’s ability to think, learn, and act together, through a human-centered deployment of AI that optimizes team outcomes.
- Leadership decision-making support: Support leaders in ensuring AI initiatives advance strategic priorities and align with organizational goals to deliver ROI.
- Research red-teaming: Identify gaps, risks, and implementation challenges in novel or high-risk projects.
- Optimized experimental design: Design cost-effective, adaptive experiments, including A/B testing and surveys, to maximize decision-making.
Put into practice +
- Aerospace & Defense: NASA funded research on how team composition, leadership structures, and social dynamics affect performance under extreme conditions have informed the design of future long-duration space exploration teams and improved our understanding of team effectiveness in extreme settings.
- Organizational management: Support enterprises in maximizing their teams’ performance through a responsible and human-centered deployment of generative AI solutions that increase the collective memory, attention and reasoning of teams.
- Marketing contagion: Tested and deployed a low-cost marketing experiment that delivered a natural word-of-mouth marketing campaign, while offering real-time ROI metrics and recommendations of future experiments.
Collabathons
Support our innovative Collabathons—intensive multi-day collaborative events that blend "collaboration" and "hackathon" to tackle complex scientific challenges. Your donation helps the Network Science Institute continue this successful tradition that has already produced valuable research tools downloaded by thousands of scientists worldwide. Collabathons provide unique educational opportunities for early-career researchers while creating methodological frameworks that advance the entire field of network science. By contributing today, you'll help fund these transformative experiences that bring together participants from academia, industry, government, and NGOs to collaborate on groundbreaking solutions to society's most pressing problems.
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Student Research
Support our students and open doors for the next generation of network scientists across NetSI's three vibrant locations—Boston, London, and Portland, Maine. Your donation directly helps these talented learners to participate in crucial scientific conferences and international research events, covering travel expenses and registration fees. Beyond travel opportunities, your generosity enables students to purchase books and other educational materials that fuel their intellectual growth. By donating to this fund, you're not just covering costs—you're fostering career-defining encounters, cross-cultural scientific exchange, and the personal development that comes from engaging with different research communities around the world.
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NetSci 2026
The Network Science Institute will be hosting the NetSci 2026 conference in Boston. This annual flagship international event of the Network Science Society is dedicated to advancing research and collaboration in the interdisciplinary field of network science. The conference brings together leading researchers, practitioners, and students from different disciplines to share discoveries, discuss emerging problems, and foster new collaborations. Your donation will contribute towards the organizational costs of this large-scale event and towards students’ registration fees.
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NetSI Sport
Join us in revolutionizing how we understand sports through the lens of network science. The NetSI Sport initiative represents a groundbreaking fusion of complex systems science and sports analytics, initially focusing on uncovering the hidden patterns and nonlinear dynamics of soccer. Your donation will help expand this innovative research program that has already secured comprehensive data from top men's and women's leagues across England, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the United States. Beyond advancing rigorous sports analytics, your support will empower the next generation of network scientists through educational workshops that introduce high school students and junior scholars to powerful analytical tools using the universal language of sports. By investing in NetSI Sport today, you're not only deepening our understanding of team dynamics in athletics but also fostering critical complex systems thinking that can ultimately transform human health outcomes and social infrastructure. Help us turn a decade-long "what if" into a sustainable research program that reveals the interconnected patterns invisible to the average viewer.