“Conversation with the Dean” lecture series featuring Professor Andrew Papachristos

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’s “Conversation with the Dean” is a faculty speaker series designed to deliver insights into the cutting-edge research and teaching from faculty experts around the College. The series is offered live to Weinberg College leadership society donors with a real-time Q&A. Learn more about the leadership giving society here. The series is available to all Weinberg College alumni in the days following the event.

Professor Andrew V. Papachristos and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss Northwestern Neighborhood Network Initiative (N3), an incubator where students, faculty, and experts look at key problems facing Chicago and its surrounding communities. N3 engages with communities, civic partners, and policymakers while focusing on how social relationships among networks, geographic communities, and the constellation of groups, organizations, and civic partners affect how people feel, think, and do.

Watch the conversation below:

Meet Andrew Papachristos

Andrew V. Papachristos is a Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Northwestern Neighborhood & Network Initiative. Papachristos aims to understand how the connected nature of cities—how their citizens, neighborhoods, and institutions are tied to one another—affect what we feel, think, and do. His main research applies network science to the study of gun violence, police misconduct, illegal gun markets, Al Capone, street gangs, and urban neighborhoods. He is also in the process of completing a manuscript on the evolution of black street gangs and politics in Chicago from the 1950s to the early-2000s. Papachristos is also actively involved in policy-related research, including the evaluation of gun violence prevention programs in more than a dozen U.S. cities. An author of more than 50 articles, Papachristos’ work has appeared in journals such as JAMA, The American Sociological Review, Criminology, The American Journal of Public Health, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune, among other outlets. Papachristos was awarded an NSF Early CAREER award to examine how violence spreads through high-risk social networks in several U.S. cities. Read more about Professor Papachristos’ work here.

Meet Dean Adrian Randolph
Adrian Randolph is dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities. Dean Randolph’s research focuses on the art and architecture of medieval Renaissance Italy. He joined Northwestern in 2015 from Dartmouth College. There, he served as the associate dean of the faculty for the Arts and Humanities, chair of the Department of Art History, and director of the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities.