Dr. Kathryn Coronges is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point. Dr. Coronges received a Masters degree in Public Health with an emphasis in Epidemiology in 2005 and a PhD in Health Behavior in 2009 from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her dissertation used dynamic social network modeling techniques to investigate the role of friendship dynamics in the spread of alcohol and marijuana cognitions and behaviors. She has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership since July 2009. Within the Sociology program, she teaches an interdisciplinary course in Social Network Analysis for Public Policy which focuses on using network methodology and concepts to evaluate and design public and global policy (topics include energy, education, social media, information security, and health care systems). She has been the advisor for numerous cadets (including majors in Sociology, Engineering Psychology, and Math) on honors theses and summer internship projects. Dr Coronges is also a Research Fellow in West Point’s Network Science Center, where she is active building research initiatives that apply social network analysis to important military issues. Her research explores the effects of social and organizational network structures of groups (from teams to societies) on communication patterns and performance outcomes.
TeachingSocial Inequality
Social Network Analysis
Coronges,K. Miller, K. & Tamayo, C. (2012). A Network evaluation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians among US Military cadets. (Forthcoming in Journal of Homosexuality).
Ringler, K. Arney, C. & Coronges, K. (2012). USMA's Minerva research initiative: Why is understanding culture important for the military? Phalanx: The Bulletin of Military Operations Research, 45(1): 27-29.
Coronges, K, Szablowski, E., & Arney, C. (2012). Generation 2.0: Social media and the future of the Army. Phalanx: The Bulletin of Military Operations Research, 45 (1): pp 27-29.
Dodge, R., Coronges, K., & Rovira, E. (2012). Empirical benefits of training to phishing susceptibility, In Proceedings of the 27th IFIP SEC International Information Security and Privacy Conference, June 2012.
Coronges, K. Dodge, R., Mukina, C., Radwick, Z., Shevchik, K., & Rovira, E. The Influences of social networks on phishing vulnerability, In IEEE Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2366-2773), January 2012.
Coronges, K., Valente, T.W., & Stacy, A.W. (2011). Social network influences of alcohol and marijuana cognitive associations. Journal of Addictive Behaviors, Volume 36, Issue 12, pp. 1305-1308.
Dr. Coronges is interested in applications of behavioral science theories and methodologies to important Army-related issues, particularly those with socio-cultural and organizational implications at the strategic and operational levels. Her research projects are diverse, and use data from a range of sources including trust and leadership networks from military organizations, social & political ideological networks and sentiments from social media, and simulated socio-cultural event scenarios for red teaming exercises. Projects share the underlying goal to analyze the role of social network structures, and the dynamics of these networks, in communication processes (such as modeling how knowledge and ideologies are spread), performance (task completion and cooperation within a unit) and leadership (identifying formal and informal emergent leaders). Two of the current research projects addressing these issues are:
- Cadet Leadership Network Structures (C-LeNS)
C-LeNS is a longitudinal study that is focused on identifying distinct structures and dynamics of formal and informal social networks among US Military Academy cadets as a model for information spread and influence in a military environment (funded by ARI)
- New Framework for Modeling Social Media Data
This is a collaboration with Math professors, Hilary Fletcher and Chris Arney that attempts to develop a framework to integrate “big” social media and field data to model social, political and environmental factors involved in tipping protests into riots (funded by ARO).