Director of the Durham Research Methods Centre,
Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology
Contact Professor Brian Castellani
In addition to being Director of the DRMC, I am Co-Director of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry (Northeastern Ohio Medical University), Editor of the Routledge Complexity in Social Science series, CO-I for the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Social Sciences. I am trained as a public health sociologist, clinical psychologist, and methodologist and take a transdisciplinary approach to my work. My methodological focus is primarily on computational modelling and mixed-methods. My colleagues and I have spent the past ten years developing a new case-based, data mining approach to modelling complex social systems and social complexity – case-based computational modelling – which we have used to help researchers, policy evaluators, and public sector organisations address a variety of complex public health issues, from depression and allostatic load to air pollution and brain health to the social determinants of health inequalities. We also developed COMPLEX-IT, designed to increase non-expert access to the tools of computational social science (i.e., cluster analysis, artificial intelligence, data visualization, data forecasting, and scenario simulation) to make better sense of the complex world(s) in which they live and work. As Director of the DRMC, my goal is to facilitate across the university a transdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach to social and health science, grounded in a complex systems perspective.
Staff Profile
Dr Caroline Dodd-Reynolds, PhD; SFHEA
Professor Jochen Einbeck, PhD Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
I have been one of the founding Co-Directors of the Durham Institute for Data Science (IDAS), and a Fellow of the DRMC since its inception. I am delighted to serve now as a Co-Director of the DRMC where I will be mainly responsible for implementing Health Data Science training and research programmes.
Dr Jeremy Kendal
Dr Jennifer Badham
My methodological research interests include survey measurement, causal inference, and minimum mixture models. My substantive research centers around elections, party politics, democratization and autocratization. I am a member of the Varieties of Democracy project, serving as Project Manager for Statistical Computing.
Dr Bilal Ashraf
Mrs Laura Masterman