The Computational Social Science program prepares students to understand, engage with, and innovatively solve evolving, complex multi-scale challenges such as climate change, transnational political violence, cybersecurity, social polarization, and inequality. This program will draw on and enhance Pitt’s strength in both social science theory, broadly construed, as well as computer science, informatics, and networked systems. Students will gain an understanding of modern computational tools and resources, and social, political, and economic concepts from core social science classes. 

This integrated training will empower students to a) enhance scalable computational tools with useful domain knowledge from the social sciences as well as b) extend existing theories related to social challenges using digital data sources and computation on them. The ultimate goal of the computational social science major is to train students to build, compute, and improve theoretically informed models of social processes, bridging domain and technical expertise.