David Hachen

David Hachen is an associate professor of sociology and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA) at the University of Notre Dame. His current research focuses on the dynamic analysis of social networks. In the NSF-funded NetSense project, Hachen’s research team has been collecting data on the social networks of college students for four years through smartphones in order to model network evolution, tie formation and dissolution, and the effects of social ties on people’s tastes, attitudes and behaviors. In the new NIH-funded NetHealth project, Hachen’s team will extend the NetSense study in order to examine how social network ties can lead to changes in people’s health behaviors, in particular their physical activity levels and sleep habits. Dr. Hachen is also the author of an innovative introduction to sociology textbook, Sociology in Action: Cases for Critical and Sociological Thinking (Sage, 2001) which uses decision cases to activate student learning.