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Karen Cook

woman with long blond hair in front of a decorated Stanford column

Karen Cook

Director, Institute for Research in the Social Sciences
Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology
Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity
Executive Committee

About

Karen S. Cook is the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology and Vice-Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Stanford University. She conducts research on social interaction, social networks, social exchange, and trust. She has edited a number of books in the Russell Sage Foundation Trust Series including Trust in Society (2001), Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Emerging Perspectives (with R. Kramer, 2004), eTrust: Forming Relations in the Online World (with C. Snijders, V. Buskens, and Coye Cheshire, 2009), and Whom Can We Trust? (with M. Levi and R. Hardin, 2009). In 1996, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2007 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2014 she was elected to the governing Council of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2004 she received the ASA Social Psychology Section’s Cooley-Mead Award for career contributions to social psychology.