This month guest host and BCTR associate director Maria Fitzpatrick chats with Will Hobbs about his research on sudden changes and how people adapt to them. The change in question could be personal, like the death of a friend, or societal, like a governmental policy shift. As a researcher, he's most often associated with methods such as data science using complex data sources and causal inference.

William Hobbs is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. He is also in the Department of Government and on the graduate field faculty in Information Science. Hobbs studies politics and health, especially the social effects of government actions and how small groups of people adapt to sudden changes in their lives. His recent projects have studied the development of public attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act, how social networks heal after a death, and unintended consequences of online censorship in China.