Mathijs De Vaan

Mathijs received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University after defending his dissertation in June 2015. He will move to Berkeley where he recently accepted an offer to join the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Mathijs is currently working on several projects each of which uses network analytic techniques to answer questions about how relational structures guide the behavior of social actors. The substantive contexts of this research includes referral networks in healthcare, peer networks in CEO compensation, and collaboration networks in cancer research.

Biography

Mathijs received his PhD from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University after defending his dissertation in June 2015. He will move to Berkeley where he recently accepted an offer to join the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

In his dissertation, Mathijs explains why unsafe prescription drugs kill more than 100,000 people each year in the United States alone. He shows that the evidence that is produced about the safety of prescription drugs is deeply embedded in a social system. For example, when physicians report their complaints about prescription drugs to the Food and Drug Administration they are heavily influenced by news about drug safety -- as shown by the strong increase in their reporting likelihood following news about the withdrawal of a prescription drug. Moreover, when interpreting the content of such news reports, physicians are not just more likely to report complaints related to the drug that is withdrawn, but also complaints related to drugs that treat the same health condition. The result is that temporal patterns in reporting emerge that are not directly related to the number of patients affected by unsafe drugs. Mathijs' research shows that these temporal patterns create noise that substantially reduces the ability of the Food and Drug Administration to take timely regulatory action.

Mathijs is currently working on several projects each of which uses network analytic techniques to answer questions about how relational structures guide the behavior of social actors. The substantive contexts of this research includes referral networks in healthcare, peer networks in CEO compensation, and collaboration networks in cancer research.