Hi, I’m Simon
I'm a sociologist of digital technologies and a computational social scientist. I’m currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, which is part of the D^3 Digital, Data, and Design Institute at Harvard Business School.
My current research focuses on the social and economic impacts of generative AI. I also have a stream of research examining the dynamics of entrepreneurship in the creator economy.
I received my PhD in economic sociology from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2022. After that, I worked at Meta as a research scientist on the FinTech Economics team studying the economics of Web3 technologies.
Let’s chat
I’m always happy to talk to other academics as well as people in industry and government about potential research collaborations or job opportunities. Feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to chat.
Updates
| March 19, 2025 | Jackie Lane and I will be co-presenting "Greenlighting Innovative Projects" at the NBER Productivity Lunch. |
| February 10, 2025 | Presenting a poster for "Greenlighting Innovative Projects" at the Organization Science Winter Conference. |
| February 4, 2025 | Presenting "Greenlighting innovative projects: How evaluation format shapes the perceived feasibility of novel ideas" (Jacqueline Lane, Simon Friis, Tianxi Cai, Griffin Weber, Michael Menietti, Eva Guinan) at Harvard Business School's D3 Idea-X Lab meeting. |
| October 23, 2024 | Invited panel speaker on algorithmic bias and inequality at a private industry event. |
| October 15, 2024 | Started a new position as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH)! |
| May 22, 2024 | Harvard Business Review published my article with Rebecca Karp and Carolyn Fu: How Your Business Should Tap into the Creator Economy. |
| May 13, 2024 | Presenting "Using LLMs to identify product development opportunities: Predicting latent needs from social media data" (with Rebecca Karp) at the Harvard Business School D^3 Research Day. |
| May 9, 2024 | Presenting "Measuring moral resistance to AI in the US labor market" (joint work with James Riley) at the Workshop on AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) hosted by Microsoft Research. |
| May 1, 2024 | Presenting "Measuring moral resistance to AI in the US labor market" (joint work with James Riley) at the MIT Economic Sociology Working Group. |
| Sep 29, 2023 | Harvard Business Review published my article with James Riley: Eliminating Algorithmic Bias Is Just the Beginning of Equitable AI. |