Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor of Physics is elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Albert-László Barabási was sitting at the Central Café in Budapest, Hungary, when he got the call that he had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his work in network science.
Recognition of network science seemed to be a long time coming, he says.
In 2005, the National Research Council—“the principal operational and programmatic arm of the National Academies,” according to the National Academies website—published a report titled, simply, “Networked Science.”
In it, Barabási says that “the Academy has officially defined network science as an independent field of investigation that is not simply part of mathematics or physics,” but an arena with its own set of questions that justify specific investigation and unique methods. .
Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, has followed this line of research since 1995. Now he becomes the first faculty member from the Northeast to be elected to the NAS while working at the Northeast.
Herbert Levine, distinguished university professor of physics and fellow of the Academy, was elected to the organization before joining Northeastern.
Network science, says Barabási, examines how networks “determine our lives.” At the Barabási Lab, he and his researchers have studied how networks affect everything from subcellular and genetic interactions to how professional connections can help success, to how artistic philanthropists give in their communities.
Society itself, says Barabási, “is nothing more than a sum of many social and professional ties”.
Network science, he continues, focuses on how to “understand the [mathematical] standards and laws that govern these real networks.”
As a member of five other academies, including the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Barabási says “the National Academy is very special because it is the official stakeholder of what science means in the United States.”
“Its members”, he continues, “can give their opinion on many issues relating to national and scientific policy – and also internationally”.
Barabási sees this honor as a recognition of network science as a whole. “Network science is a new field,” he says, “which has only recently found its place in the scientific canon.”
“This is especially important for the Northeast because we have the main networked science institute in the world”, he continues.
“And now the members of the National Academy have recognized that the pursuit of network science deserves a place in the academic canon – I think it’s a great honor for the entire field.”
The fact that he was sitting in Café Central when he received the call has a special resonance for Barabási – it was there that the concept of six degrees of separation was first proposed by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy.
Coffee “is officially considered the cradle of network thinking”. It felt like a very symbolic moment, he says.
