Rate My Professor Seth Frey

Seth Frey is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California, Davis, a position he has held since advancing from Assistant Professor in 2023. He additionally serves as Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science Program since 2018, Society & Technology External Faculty in the Computer Science Graduate Group since 2018, and Faculty Affiliate in the Animal Behavior and Psychology Graduate Groups. Earlier in his career, Frey was a Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College's Neukom Institute for Computational Science from 2015 to 2018, Postdoctoral Researcher at Disney Research Zurich from 2013 to 2015, and Lecturer in the Department of Human, Social, and Political Sciences at ETH Zürich in 2015. Frey received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics from Indiana University Bloomington in 2013, focusing on the cognitive science of strategic reasoning under committee members including Rob Goldstone, Elinor Ostrom, Peter Todd, Jerome Busemeyer, and Johan Bollen. He earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004.

In the Department of Communication, Frey leads the Computational Communication Research Lab, utilizing digital trace data, computer simulations, and computational social science methods to investigate institutional analysis, strategic behavior, online governance, and commons management. His funded research includes principal investigator roles on significant grants such as the NSF Growing Convergence Research award of $3,400,000 in 2020 for "Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects With Evidence-Based Rules and Structures," NSF Designing Accountable Software Systems collaborative research grant of $749,927 in 2022, Ford Foundation Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund ($50,000, 2023), and Mozilla Foundation Grant for the Web ($80,680, 2020). Frey has received honors including the Indiana University Cognitive Science Program Outstanding Dissertation Award (2014), IEEE ACSOS Outstanding Service Award (2022), ICA Computational Methods Top Paper (2020), and ACM CSCW Honorable Mention Best Paper (2019). Select publications encompass "Institutional similarity drives cultural similarity among online communities" with Qiankun Zhong (Scientific Reports, 2022), "A dynamic over games drives selfish agents to win-win outcomes" with Christopher Atkisson (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2020), "Decentralizing Platform Power: A Design Space of Multi-Level Governance in Online Social Platforms" (Social Media + Society, 2023), and "Modular politics: Toward a governance layer for online communities" (2021).