Eric Forbush, a first year doctoral student at the Annenberg School, has been awarded a fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). He is one of 2,000 scholars chosen from among 13,000 applicants.

As a GRFP Fellow, Mr. Forbush will receive three years of research funding to explore how the field of computational social science—utilizing computer modeling, social network analysis and virtual simulations to understand social dynamics—might help address issues of segregation in communities. He plans to conduct ethnographic interviews and collect data from social networking sites to inform his creation of an agent-based model, allowing him to conduct virtual simulations to discover the conditions needed to increase diversity and decrease segregation.

Mr. Forbush holds a BA in communication studies from Northeastern University in Boston.