The University of South Florida (USF) Social Networks Research Collaborative (SNRC), housed in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Morsani College of Medicine, is proud to announce its inaugural launch this summer. The SNRC serves as a regional and national hub for advancing social network science and its application to pressing challenges in health and education.
The collaborative is led Director Dr. Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo, Co-Director Dr. John Skvoretz (Co-Director), and Associate Director Dr. David Dillon—a multidisciplinary leadership team spanning the social sciences and clinical domains. Together, the SNRC brings deep expertise in social network analysis, cultural models, implementation science, and translational research.
The SNRC is uniquely situated within USF’s Department of Emergency Medicine, a setting that has increasingly emphasized social medicine and medical anthropology as essential components of patient care and health systems innovation. This environment reflects a growing recognition that health outcomes are shaped not only by clinical factors, but also by social relationships, structural conditions, and access to resources. By embedding network science within a clinical department, the SNRC is positioned to directly translate theory and methods into practice.
The collaborative brings together sociologists, medical anthropologists, clinicians, educators, and implementation scientists to investigate how social network structure and composition influence behavior, learning, resource access, and biological processes. While social networks are consistently linked to improved health, treatment adherence, and educational persistence, the mechanisms underlying these effects remain underdeveloped, and networks remain underutilized as targets for intervention.
Through its research agenda, the SNRC advances theory-driven, methodologically rigorous approaches to understanding these mechanisms and to designing network-informed interventions. The goal is to establish social networks as measurable, modifiable features of social environments that can be leveraged to improve outcomes across clinical, educational, and community settings.
To mark its launch, the SNRC will host a coffee reception at the upcoming June 2026 International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) Sunbelt Conference in Daytona Beach, Florida. The SNRC welcomes this and other opportunity to connect with researchers, practitioners, and potential collaborators to explore opportunities for partnership.