David G. Rand

David G. Rand is an American academic who is a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University. His research uses behavioral experiments, field studies, and computational methods to study cooperation, human decision-making, misinformation, political polarization, and interactions between humans and generative artificial intelligence.

Biography Rand grew up in Ithaca, New York, where his father is a professor at Cornell University. As a teenager he was in several rock bands, including solo project Robot Goes Here.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell in computational biology in 2004, then worked for two years at Gene Network Sciences. He then went to Harvard, where he earned a PhD in systems biology in 2009. After 4 years of post-doctoral studies at Harvard, in 2013 Rand began an assistant professorship at Yale University in psychology, economics, management. In 2017 he was appointed a tenure-track associate professor in psychology at Yale. In 2018 he was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Yale, and then moved to MIT as a tenured associate professor, where he then became full professor. In 2025, he joined Cornell University as a professor of Information Science, Marketing, and Psychology.

In January 2012, Rand was named to Wired Magazine's Smart List 2012 as one of "50 people who will change the world".

Publications Scientific

Author's manuscript at Harvard repository

Popular media

Notes and references