Dashun Wang

🔥Download the Science of Science book for FREE🔥 We're VERY excited to make the whole book freely available: dashunwang.com/book/the-scien… Please help us RT & let everyone know of this resource! #ScienceOfScience

Let’s go!!! 🚀🚀🚀

@MishaTeplitskiy Super. Sending it to my wife… thanks in advance for helping me win an argument at home!

Sending kids early to daycare means they'll be sick all the time, but that's completely offset by their being less sick when they go to elementary school

wow this is cool!

Link to paper: nature.com/articles/d4158…

AI agents are “Airplanes for the mind”. Check out my latest piece in @Nature, where I outline an agenda for how to think about AI agents in science and discovery. Steve Jobs famously called computers “bicycles for the mind”—a metaphor for the personal-computing era, emphasizing tools that let individuals go farther and faster with less effort. Today, AI agents demand a new metaphor. They are airplanes for the mind: heavier-than-air machines that should not fly but do. These “airplanes” have the potential to dramatically extend the scale, speed, and coordination of human cognition, while introducing new challenges for science and discovery. The piece outlines five key principles to help us understand what changes for science when AI systems move from passive tools to active partners. Throughout history, discoveries have been made by humans. As AI systems increasingly participate in discovery, the central question is how we design human–AI collaboration to make science more accountable, reproducible, and ultimately transformative. The question is not whether machines replace scientists, but what kind of scientist emerges when we learn to fly. Check out the piece and let me know what you think! Link in the first reply

Science is often described as a global enterprise, where ideas move freely across borders and evaluation is based on merit alone. Today’s geopolitical environment, however, is putting that ideal to the test. In a new column on VoxEU, my coauthors and I present experimental evidence on how geopolitics enters the evaluation stage of international collaboration. We asked U.S. policymakers and U.S.-based scientists to assess identical hypothetical research proposals. The only difference was the location of the foreign collaborator: Germany or China. The results are striking. Unconditional support drops significantly when the collaborator is based in China, and the pattern holds across fields. Importantly, the shift reflects greater caution rather than outright rejection—more safeguards, scrutiny, and risk requirements. These findings suggest that geopolitical considerations are influencing decisions before collaborations even begin. Read the full column: cepr.org/voxeu/columns/… joint work with @zfurnas @rxjia @mollyeroberts

Excited for the 2026 ICSSI in the beautiful Boulder CO!! Join us!!!

@william__brady Congratulations 🎉🎊🍾

Very honored by this one! Thanks to all my mentors, students and colleagues who made it possible! And congrats to all the recipients for their amazing work.

@VickyCYang @sfiscience @hyejin_youn Glad to see this out! Great work!

Thanks @sfiscience for an accessible coverage of our paper! @hyejin_youn

🚨New Op Ed today in @TheAtlantic where we discuss the party that keeps funding science and why institutions matter, drawing from our paper in @ScienceMagazine: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

US policymakers and scientists show much lower support for proposals with China-based versus Germany-based collaborators, with similar patterns across fields, from @zfurnas, Ruixue Jia, Margaret E. Roberts, and Dashun Wang nber.org/papers/w34789

These findings contribute to an emerging stream of literature examining the link between initial setbacks and achievements, extending our earlier work on early-career setbacks in science (nature.com/articles/s4146…) and adding new evidence from the world of sports. Together, they highlight the subtle but profound role that failure can play in shaping long-term achievement, and they offer insight into the mechanisms that drive cumulative advantage, resilience, and talent development. The big takeaway is simple: Early setbacks, as it turns out, may act as inflection points—opportunities to learn, adapt, and grow stronger. 4/4

Our findings show that past performance is overall predictive of future outcomes, but we also uncover a striking and consistent pattern across both domains: those who initially narrowly missed victory tend to go on to outperform their winning counterparts in the future. The fourth-place track and field finishers, for example, were more likely than bronze medalists to win future medals—and even to break records. Similarly, the unlucky losers in tennis went on to outperform the lucky losers in future tournaments. 3/4

🏅 🏅 🏅 Who goes on to achieve greater success in individual professional sports: the Bronze medalist or the one who just missed the podium? Check out our paper in Scientific Reports: Early Career Setback and Future Achievement in Professional Sports. Huge thanks to my co-authors @Kalyan_Suman_, Yang Wang, @nimatabari, @VictoriaMedvec, and @UzziLeadership. We systematically examine the future performance of winners and non-winners across two sports contexts, using two different empirical strategies. 1/4

@Kaiping_Chen @ica_cm @AEJMC_ComSHER Thanks so much for the shout out!

👇Check this wonderful postdoc opening at Kellogg/Northwestern on: - LLMs & AI agents - Political science (science, policy & governance) - Technological progress + societal impacts of science - Nonequilibrium statistical physics @ica_cm @AEJMC_ComSHER #scicomm #CSS

Postdoc openings at Kellogg/Northwestern! We’re a purposefully multidisciplinary group working at the intersection of science-of-science, innovation, AI, networks, and complexity. We’re looking for postdocs who want to ask bold new questions, with rigorous data, theory, and computation. Candidates from all disciplines are welcome. This year we’re especially excited about candidates interested in one or more of the following areas: - LLMs & AI agents - Political science (science, policy & governance) - Technological progress + societal impacts of science - Nonequilibrium statistical physics Review begins Feb 15 (rolling until filled). Apply / details:kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-rese… Please share with great candidates! Thank you! Join us!!!

@FeixiongCheng @CclcM @CleClinicMD @ClevelandClinic Congratulations!! Very nice!!

The first day to office in 2026! The best gift received in this morning to start new year! Thank you for all support from @cclcm and @CleClinicMD @ClevelandClinic Research

@rahulvrane @ErzhuoShao @NatComputSci @KelloggCSSI @KelloggSchool @ResearchNU @qian_yifan @yifanginhz Then it becomes a typical LLM.

@dashunwang @ErzhuoShao @NatComputSci @KelloggCSSI @KelloggSchool @ResearchNU @qian_yifan @yifanginhz Sorry for the naive question, but does this work beyond scisci networks?

🚨New paper out in Nature Computational Science! Introducing #SciSciGPT: an open-source, multi-agent, prototype AI collaborator designed to support research and discovery, using the science of science as a testbed. Led by the amazing @ErzhuoShao Demo + paper below! 1/n

From blood vessels to neurons, physical networks are modeled as wires optimized for length. In @Nature we how surface minimization, via a surprising link to string theory, explains brain and vascular architecture, including neuronal sprouting. Paper: barabasi.com/science/public…