Jason Radford, Ph.D.

I am currently a senior research scientist at Northeastern University and the CEO of Volunteer Science Inc. At Northeastern, my work centers around the Social Design Lab, where we translate the research going on at the Network Science Institute and the university into new applications. At Volunteer Science, I set the vision and strategy for the company and oversee the daily operations. 

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2020. For my dissertation, I studied what makes No Excuses charter schools effective. I have been working with David Lazer at Northeastern University since 2014, raising and managing over $5 million in funding for research on group effectiveness, online experiments, and research infrastructure. I co-founded Volunteer Science Inc with David, Jeff Hoye, and Waleed Meleis in 2019 and remain its President and CEO. 

Currently, I am building a community of translational social scientists and developing repeatable and scalable processes for turning social scientific research into technologies that solve problems. That includes running the Impacting Science Speaker series to help develop a culture of translational thinking; a workshop on designing, funding, and creating scientific ventures; and developing reserach partnerships between the university and external stakeholders.