Awards

Titled Professor - 2025

James H. Rudy Professor

About Santo Fortunato

Santo Fortunato is the James H. Rudy Professor of Informatics and Computing at Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering of Indiana University. Previously he was professor of complex systems at the Department of Computer Science of Aalto University, Finland. Prof. Fortunato got his PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. His focus areas are network science, especially community detection in graphs, computational social science and science of science. His research has been published in leading journals, including Nature, Science, Nature Physics, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, Reviews of Modern Physics, Physics Reports and has collected over 50,000 citations (Google Scholar). His single-author article Community detection in graphs (Physics Reports 486, 75-174, 2010) is one of the best known and most cited papers in network science. Fortunato received the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics 2011, a prize given by the German Physical Society, for his outstanding contributions to the physics of social systems. He is Fellow of the Network Science Society (2022) and of the American Physical Society (2022). He is the Founding Chair of the International Conference of Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which he first organized in Helsinki in June 2015. He was Chair of Networks 2021, the largest ever event on network science, a historical merger of the NetSci and Sunbelt conferences. He is author of the book A First Course in Network Science, by Cambridge University Press (2020), the most accessible textbook on the new science of networks.