Sociology

David Peterson

David Peterson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Peterson received his PhD from Northwestern University and was a postdoc at UCLA before joining Purdue. He studies the nexus of scientific practice, emerging technologies, and expert authority. Currently, his work focuses on two topics. First, he studies how the organizations of science are evolving to meet a variety of threats including political pressure, intensifying global competition, new communications and machine learning technologies, and emerging regulatory and managerial bodies. Second, he investigates the production of science in areas that have had chronic legitimacy problems (like the social sciences) to shed light on the complex interactions between politics, expertise, and authority.

Shawn Bauldry

Shawn Bauldry is Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Bauldry received his PhD in Sociology and MS in Statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining the Purdue faculty in 2016. His research in quantitative methods and statistics has primarily focused on the development of structural equation models, a broad class of statistical models with wide applicability in the social sciences. His research in medical sociology and aging has examined relationships between socioeconomic resources and health over the life course and across multiple generations.