Chris Danforth is a Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont. He is Director of the Vermont Advanced Computing Center, and along with Peter Sheridan Dodds runs the Computational Story Lab research group at the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He received a B.S. in Mathematics & Physics from Bates College in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics & Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2006. He is the co-inventor of
http://hedonometer.org, a socio-technical instrument estimating daily happiness based on social media, and has also developed algorithms to identify predictors of depression from Instagram photos. Danforth also leads the Lived Experiences Measured Using Rings Study, a longitudinal experiment incentivizing wellbeing. His work has been funded by MassMutual, NSF, NIH, NASA, NOAA, DARPA, DOE, and the MITRE Corporation. Danforth has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications applying mathematical techniques to many fields including atmospheric science, linguistics, psychology, literature, finance, physics, engineering, and biochemistry. He received the Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award in 2022, and the University Scholar Award in 2024. Danforth has advised over 50 research dissertations including 20 PhD students, 20 MS students, and 15 undergraduate thesis students. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website:
http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort