Rate My Professor Dani Bassett

Dani Bassett serves as the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with primary appointment in the Department of Bioengineering and secondary appointments across the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychology. Additionally, Bassett holds the position of external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Educational achievements include a B.S. in Physics from Pennsylvania State University (2004), Certificate of Postgraduate Studies in Physics from the University of Cambridge, Churchill College (2005), and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cambridge, King's College (2009), earned as a Churchill Scholar and NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Bassett completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind.

Leading the Complex Systems Lab, Bassett's research focuses on network neuroscience and complex systems, blending neural engineering, physics, and mathematics to elucidate mechanisms of cognition, behavior, learning, and disease in brain networks. The lab investigates dynamic network changes, topological influences on signal propagation, and applications to physical systems like granular matter and biological systems including brain connectivity in development, epilepsy, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and autism. Bassett has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications garnering over 40,000 citations, including recent papers on browsing behaviors and gender-education links (Science Advances, 2024), musical structure in Bach (Physical Review Research, 2024), and chaos quantification via machine learning (Physical Review Letters, 2024). Bassett co-authored the book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection with Perry Zurn (MIT Press, 2022). Prestigious honors encompass the American Psychological Association Rising Star (2012), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), MacArthur Fellowship (2014), IEEE EMBS Early Achievement Award (2015), NSF CAREER (2016), Lagrange Prize (2017), Erdős–Rényi Prize (2018), OHBM Young Investigator (2020), AIMBE Fellow (2020), APS Fellow (2021), multiple years as Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, and the George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award (2023). Research is funded by NSF, NIH, ARO, ONR, DoD, Sloan, MacArthur, and Paul G. Allen Foundations.