Bilal Khan joined the Department of Sociology as a full professor during 2016. He is part of what makes the UNL Sociology department uniquely interdisciplinary, with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Khan develops (1) new technologies to collect complex data from populations over long timescales; (2) new mathematical data analysis techniques to resolve important scientific questions about society; (3) new algorithms to forecast societal trends via simulation models. These advances are applied to address the needs of hard-to-reach populations (e.g. people who inject drugs, sex workers), and to advance our understanding of the process underlying addiction and recovery. His research has appeared in journals including Substance Use and Misuse, PLoS One, Social Science Research, and Human Organization, among others.
Recent important findings by Dr. Khan show that (a) it is possible to estimate the size of a socially networked population from a single respondent-driven sample (see article); (b) network “firewalls” are what makes HIV prevalence stabilize at ~60% among intravenous drug users (see article); (c) it is possible to quantify the amount of “free will” manifested and constraint experienced by different populations (see article); and (d) one can deduce the amount of cash being spent on illegal guns, drugs, and sex in a set of interlinked cities (see article).
Dr. Khan regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate level seminars on computational social science through agent-based modeling, as well as mentoring a large number of undergraduate and graduate students as part of the REACH Lab.
We are so glad to have Dr. Bilal Khan unique insights into computational social science as part of UNL Sociology!
