Dr. Anna Maria Matziorinis

I study the connective tissue of society: the ties that hold families, relationships, workplaces, institutions, and systems of public care together, and the places where that tissue strains or tears. The work applies graph theory, systems thinking, and cognitive neuroscience to problems that range from healthcare fragmentation to the architecture of collective intelligence.

At the center of it are social ripple behaviors: the ways emotion, strain, and conduct pass from one person to the next. Decades of research on emotional contagion, stress crossover, and behavioral spread through social networks show that what happens to one person rarely stays with them. It moves outward along the ties they share, shaping the moods, choices, and well-being of people they may never meet. Mapping those pathways makes it possible to see how a system actually works, and where care can reach it.

I am the founder and director of Hidden Information Labs Institute, a Canadian nonprofit research institute working at the intersection of network science, computational social neuroscience, and applied graph theory.