Bio
Shaunette T. Ferguson is a network scientist trained as an economist whose research examines how complex social systems behave when people interact at scale. Originally from Jamaica, she has worked in public-sector economic policy and conducted doctoral research in Japan as a MEXT Scholar at Kobe University, experiences that inform her comparative and systems-oriented perspective. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she studies how communication, emotion, and network structure generate large-scale social patterns, particularly during periods of disruption.
Her work spans digital platforms, financial networks, and disaster-response systems, with a focus on how coordination, breakdown, and recovery emerge from timing, feedback, and interaction structure. She is also the author of When Systems Speak, a project exploring how complexity becomes visible when systems begin to strain or fail.
As part of her 2026–2027 ICDE Fellowship, she will develop an AI-assisted Coordination Readiness Kit to support NeedsMap in contexts where digital infrastructure is unreliable, translating disaster-response cases from Jamaica and the Caribbean into practical offline diagnostics, relay-node guides, and solidarity provisioning tools.