Aaron Shaw

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. During 2017-2018, I am on leave from Northwestern and am a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

At Northwestern, I am also affiliated with the Sociology Department, the Institute for Policy Research, and the Buffett Center.

I study organization, collaboration, and mobilization online. Most of my current projects try to understand why and how a few peer production communities (like Wikipedia) grow when most do not. I also work on understanding who participates (and who doesn't) in these contexts.

My research has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation (IIS-1617468), FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, the Ford Foundation, the Ewing and Marion Kaufman Foundation, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the University of California Office of the President, and the United States Department of Education.

I completed my Ph.D in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Some of my previous research has compared the participatory infrastructures of the U.S. political blogosphere; investigated the origins of Free Software policies in Brazil; and analyzed applications of crowdsourcing for both social scientific research and humanitarian crisis relief.

If you'd like to read more, here's my CV and links to papers are on my research page. For more information, copies of papers, or just to say hello, please send me an email.