Nick Adams

Former BIDS Research Fellow Nick Adams, PhD, is now Founder & Chief Scientist of Goodly Labs, an organization that provides collaborative online resources and opportunities that enable citizen scientists to engage with publicly available data. He is a sociologist, data scientist, and creator building tools and experiences that help people find common ground and build a better society. In a career motivated by his aspiration to improve the world, Adams has led electoral campaigns, directed the national security division of a think tank, completed ground-breaking research on police/protester interactions, constructed and shared massive and intricate datasets, invented new natural language processing methodologies and collaborative software, and instructed hundreds of students on topics including classical and contemporary social theory, social science methods, social psychology, political sociology, deviance and social control, and text analysis. Adams has founded and led multiple successful and surviving organizations, including Thusly Inc., UC Berkeley's Text Across Domains, the Computational Text Analysis Working Group, and his non-profit Goodly Labs, the sociotechnical skunkworks behind Public Editor, Demo Watch, Research Ready, and Same Page. His work has appeared in academic journals as well as The New York Times, Roll Call, The Atlantic, and Reader's Digest.  He has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the MCcune Foundation, Schmidt Futures, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, the Pritzker Family Fund, SAGE Publishing, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation.