Aidan Combs

Aidan Combs

Ph.D. in sociology

Duke University

About

I am a computational sociologist who studies how social labels, and the uncertainty we have about them, work in social interaction. How do we measure the uncertainty around the meaning of a label, and how does that uncertainty affect how we use and understand it? My research is rooted in social psychology and cultural sociology and I tie it to other areas such as politics, health, gender, work and occupations, and criminology. I build open source software that facilitates research on identity processes in social interaction. I received my PhD from Duke University in 2024.

I am currently a postdoctoral scholar with the BamNLP group at the University of Bamberg. Beginning in 2025 I will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University.

Download my CV .

Interests
  • Computational social science
  • Cultural sociology
  • Social psychology
  • Uncertainty
  • Identity and social interaction
  • Tool-building for social research
Education
  • PhD in Sociology, 2024

    Duke University

  • MA in Sociology, 2021

    Duke University

  • BS in Engineering Physics and Mathematics, 2018

    University of Wisconsin--Madison

(2023). Reducing Political Polarization with a Mobile Chat Platform. Nature Human Behavior.

PDF Cite Dataset DOI

(2023). Perceived Gender and Political Persuasion: A Social Media Field Experiment during the 2020 US Democratic Presidential Primary Election. Nature Scientific Reports.

PDF Cite Dataset DOI

(2023). The Effect of Occupational Status on Health: Putting the Social in Socioeconomic Status. Heliyon.

PDF Cite DOI

(2020). Assessing the Impact of the Russian Internet Research Agency on the Political Attitudes and Behaviors of American Twitter Users in Late 2017. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(1):243-250.

PDF Cite Dataset DOI

Contact