Barry Wellman, FRSC

Barry Wellman studies networks: community, communications, computer, and social. His research examines virtual community, the virtual workplace, social support, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods. Based at the University of Toronto, he holds the positions of Director of NetLab and S.D. Clark Professor at the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Information. He is the co-author of the prize-winning Networked: The New Social Operating System (with Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project), published by MIT Press in Spring 2012. The book analyzes the social nature of networked individualism, the growth of the Social Network Revolution, the Internet Revolution, and the Mobile Revolution.

Prof. Wellman is a member of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the Chair-Emeritus of both the Community and Information Technologies section and the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. He is a Fellow of IBM Toronto’s Centre for Advanced Studies. He has worked with IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, Mitel Networks, Advanced Micro Devices’ Global Consumer Advisory Board, and Intel’s People and Practices research unit. He has been a keynote speaker at conferences ranging from computer science to theology, and a committee member of the Social Science Research Council’s (and Ford Foundation’s) Program on Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security. He has published more than 200 articles, some of which were co-authored with more than 80 scholars, and he is the (co-)editor of three books.

---