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Neera Singh in 2011, NETS now has more than 30
undergraduates and will be capped at 40 incoming
students annually.
Kearns devoted much of last summer to producing six
hours of content. He perfected explanations of complex
concepts, yet stayed off camera to use the screen to
present information-rich concepts visually. He hopes to
tap Coursera’s vast reach for his research, an approach
that builds upon experiments conducted with Penn
students. Influenced by the 2008 Democratic primary
between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he
explored the link between network structure and how
groups reach unanimity. His research, published in
PNAS, demonstrated that a small but well-connected
minority can systematically control the outcome of
decision-making against the will of the majority.
“Those experiments injected energy and new material
into the classroom, and generated published scientific
articles that illustrated concepts for subsequent
students,” Kearns says. He currently is developing
the Warren Center, a new graduate program and
research initiative in network science funded by Robin
and Frederick Warren, a Penn Engineering alumnus
and Overseer. “On campus and online, together we’re
pioneering the science of this field,” says Kearns.
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