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About David
David Rand is a Professor of Information Science in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, a Professor of Marketing and Management Communications in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management of the SC Johnson College of Business, and holds a courtesy appointment as Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He earned a B.A. in Computational Biology from Cornell University in 2004, graduating summa cum laude, and a Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Harvard University in 2009. Following his doctoral studies, Rand served as a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology from 2009 to 2013. He then joined Yale University as Assistant Professor and progressed to Associate Professor with tenure in Psychology, Economics, and Management from 2013 to 2018. From 2018 to 2025, he was the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management Science and Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Cornell in 2025.
Rand’s research employs tools from computational social science and cognitive science, integrating behavioral experiments conducted online and in the field with computational models to examine human attitudes, beliefs, and choices. Key areas include leveraging dialogues with generative AI to correct inaccurate beliefs such as conspiracy theories and health misperceptions, elucidating why individuals share misinformation online and developing interventions to mitigate it, exploring political psychology and polarization, and promoting human cooperation. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles in prestigious journals including Nature, Science, PNAS, Psychological Science, CHI, and Management Science. Prominent publications are “Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI” (Science, 2024), “Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook” (Science, 2024), “Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online” (Nature, 2021), and “Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality” (PNAS, 2019). Among his honors are the 2020 Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Early Career Impact Award, Poets & Quants 2021 Best 40-Under-40 Business School Professor award, the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research from Yale University, the 2017 Poynter Institute International Fact-Checking Network Researcher of the Year (with Gordon Pennycook), and inclusion on Wired magazine’s 2012 Smart List. Rand advises technology firms such as Google, Meta, and TikTok and has contributed to outlets like The New York Times, Wired, and New Scientist.