Welcome!
I’m Dr. Phil Chodrow, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Middlebury College. My pronouns are he/him/his. You can email me at pchodrow@middlebury.edu or stop by my office, Room 218 in 75 Shannon Street.
My research sits at the intersection of applied mathematics, data science, and network science, the study of connected systems in society and nature. Recent topics include models of random hypergraphs, community detection in hypergraphs, opinion dynamics on networks, and gender representation in academic mathematics. My work is supported by the National Science Foundation.
I teach courses in math, data science, computation, and network science. I have written freely-available lecture notes for undergraduate courses on machine learning, network science (with Heather Brooks), and introductory data science in Python (with Michael Linderman). I have a CV. Middlebury students might want to take a look at my FAQs about classes and student research. I have thoughts about jobs at liberal arts colleges and help maintain a listing of CS jobs at primarily-undergraduate institutions.
When I’m not working, I’m probably drinking tea, practicing aikido, cycling, cooking, playing chess, reading, or playing board games.
News
| November 2026 |
Invited talk on math models of social influence at the Bi-College Consortium Mathematics Colloquium (hosted by Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). |
| October 2026 |
Invited talk on math models of social influence at the Santa Fe Institute. |
| New preprint! "Measuring Diversity and Segregation with Convex Functions" is a largely expository paper that gives an opinionated tour of the mathematics of spatial segregation measurement through the lens of convexity and information theory. This is a continuation of things I was thinking about a long time ago and it's refreshing to come back to them with a new eye! | |
| Middlebury student Toby Penner has produced a beautiful, large-scale network data visualization of English-language Wikipedia. I'm not involved in this in any way -- I just think it's awesome. | |
| July 2026 |
Contributed talk on gender representation in academic mathematics at the International Conference on Complex Social Systems (IC2S2) in Burlington, VT. (slides) |
| New preprint! "Growing Hypergraphs with Homophily" is joint work with mentees Violet Ross '25 and Frannie Cataldo '27. This model proposes a model of growing hypergraphs with tunable homophily based on node labels. We show how to perform both parameter inference and community detection in hypergraphs using this model. | |
| I am on leave in academic year 2026-2027. Looking forward to coming back to teaching in Fall '27! |