Danielle S. Bassett

Danielle S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with affiliations in the Departments of Bioengineering, Physics & Astronomy, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Neurology, and Psychiatry. She is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is most well known for her work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. She received a BS in physics from Penn State University and a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. She has received multiple prestigious awards, including American Psychological Association’s ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2014), MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Harvard Higher Education Leader (2015), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER (2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018). She is the author of more than 280 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 21,000 citations, as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. She is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts.  Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Tune in to Dani Bassett’s episode on the Choose to be Curious podcast:

• “Network Systems: Connecting the Dots, with Dani Bassett”

Want to teach Dani Bassett’s Curiosity Studies chapter? Consider pairing with:

• Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy (1847).

Read and listen to more from Dani Bassett on curiosity!

• Perry Zurn and Danielle S. Bassett, “Network Architectures Supporting Learnability,” Philosophical Transactions B 375.1796 (2020).
• Perry Zurn & Danielle S. Bassett, “Philosophy of Biology: Seizing an Opportunity,” eLife Magazine 8:e48336 (2019): 1-5.
• David Lydon-Staley, Perry Zurn, and Danielle S. Bassett, “Within-Person Variability in Curiosity During Daily Life and Associations for Well-Being,” Journal of Personality (2019): 1-17.
• Perry Zurn and Danielle S. Bassett, “On Curiosity: A Fundamental Aspect of Personality, a Practice of Network Growth,” Personality Neuroscience 1.e13 (2018): 1-10.
• Danielle Bassett, “Curious: Growing Knowledge Networks,” Public talk at University of Pennsylvania (February 13, 2018).
• Danielle Bassett and Perry Zurn, “Curious Minds: From Building Knowledge Networks to Inciting Political Resistance,” Public talk at MIT Media Lab (May 18, 2018).