Derek Ruths is an associate professor of Computer Science at McGill University. He joined the faculty in 2009 after completing his PhD in Computer Science at Rice University. A major research direction in his group considers the problem of characterizing and predicting the large-scale dynamics of human behavior in online social platforms. His ongoing work in this area includes quantitatively modeling how communities change over time, measuring and predicting group demographics from unstructured user-generated content, and computational methods for assessing discussion topics within a collection of users. His work has been published in top-tier journals and conferences including Science, EMNLP, ICWSM, and PLoS Computational Biology. His research is currently funded by a wide array of organizations including NSERC, SSHRC, tech companies, and the US National Science Foundation - underscoring the broad, interdisciplinary nature of his work.