Carl T. Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in evolutionary biology and mathematical population genetics, Carl is best known for working across disciplines and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. The unifying theme running throughout his work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies how communication evolves and how the process of evolution encodes information in genomes. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how norms and institutions influence scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. Within informatics, he studies how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature. Most recently, Carl’s work has focused on the spread of disinformation on social networks and what we can do about it.
