User:Douglas R. White
I am an ethno-sociologist, or social anthropologist with broad sociological as well as comparative and ethnographic interests in human societies and global historical processes. My PhD in Anthropology with a subfield in sociological theory was done with advisor E. Adamson Hoebel, University of Minnesota, although largely through the CIC Traveling Scholars Program that allowed transfer of seminar credits from the University of Michigan, Columbia, and Northwestern.
I began teaching at the University of Pittsburgh (Anthropology, with involvement also in Sociology) in 1967, finished the PhD in 1969, and continued from 1976 to the present as a Professor at the School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. I chair a research group on Social Dynamics and Complexity and lead a multicampus videoconference series in Human Social Complexity, supported by a research appointment with the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. The years of my 1990-92 Distinguished Senior U.S. Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation were largely spent at the Institute of Ethnology, Cologne, and the Maison Suger and EHESS, Paris, and a third of my time since then was spent at various European research institutes and universities. I have worked extensively since 1999 at the Santa Fe Institute for Studies in Complexity and am currently on their external faculty. I also serve on several professional societies that run the Complex Systems conferences in Europe and Internationally.
Faculty page at UC Irvine: http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/