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Douglas R. White (1942-) is an American complexity researcher, social anthropologist, sociologist, and social network researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

Born in Minneapolis, White attended the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and the University of Minnesota, where he received a B.A. in 1964, an M.A. in 1967, and a Ph.D. degree in 1969, all under advisor E. Adamson Hoebel and the CIC: Travelling Scholars Program. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1967 to 1976. Since then he has been a Social Science Professor at the University of California, Irvine, teaching in Social Relations, in Comparative Culture, in Social Networks and in Anthropology. He co-founded and has chaired the Social Networks PhD program and within the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences chairs the Social Dynamics and Complexity research group and the UC four-campus Human Sciences and Complexity videoconference group. He is on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, the governing Council of the European Complex Systems Society, and served as President of the Social Science Computing Association and of the Linkages Development Research Council. He founded the World Cultures electronic journal in 1985 as part of the movement for open access scientific data and publication and founded the open access and peer reviewed Structure and Dynamics electronic journal in 2005, where he continues as editor-in-chief.

1. longitudinal study of historical evolution and of field studies of human groups, larger societies, and city systems (see: Realistic modeling of complex interactive systems),
2. cross-cultural studies, where he is known for studies of the division of labor, sexual division of labor, polygyny, marriage and kinship systems, his collaborative creation of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), and public domain distribution of SCCS data, courseware and software,
3. mathematical modeling of social, economic, and historical dynamics, as well as statistical entailment analysis, Galton's problem, the Natchez Paradox, kinship and network simulation, regular equivalence, flow centrality, and structural cohesion,
4. social networks, including, more specifically, the network realism paradigm,
5. urban studies, including his current studies of urban dynamics over the last millennium,
6. studies of world system dynamics, and
7. social complexity and complex-network system dynamics.

He is a recipient of the U.S. Distinguished Scientist Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the "Best Paper in Mathematical Sociology of 2003" Award of the American Sociological Association (2004), and the 2007 "Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award" for the outstanding article published in the field of economic sociology in the previous two years. A reaction to his latest book, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems, by one reviewer, was that this "could be the most important book in anthropology in fifty years." His work on implications of feedback and feedforward processes, published in Physical Review in collaboration with the founder of nonextensive physics, a founder of chaos theory, and two young computer scientists, provides one of the foundational network simulations for understanding complex networks (review listed below).

White has authored or coauthored 4 books and over 100 articles, and edited 3 books and 2 special journal issues dealing with his research interests.

• Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan (Lexington Press, 2004; paperback 2006, with Ulla Johansen)
• Kinship, Networks, and Exchange (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) (Cambridge University Press, 1998, with Thomas Schweizer)
• Research Methods in Social Network Analysis (Transaction Publishers, Reprint edition, 1991, with Linton C. Freeman and A. Kimball Romney)
• Tuaraiscail: Report of the Committee on Language Attitudes Research Regarding Irish (5 volumes, Dublin: Government Printing Office, 1975, with Lilyan A. Brudner)
• The Anthropology of Urban Environments (Society for Applied Anthropology, Monograph Series, 1972, with Thomas Weaver).

• "Generative Model for Feedback Networks" in Physical Review E, 016119 (2006) (8 pages), with Nataša Kejžar, Constantino Tsallis, J. Doyne Farmer, Scott D. White (see summary in Social-circles network model). The implications of this type of model are carried further in Thurner, Kyriakopoulos and Tsallis, 2007, Unified Model for Network Dynamics Exhibiting Nonextensive Statistics Phys. Rev. E 76, 036111 (2007) (8 pages).
• "Network Dynamics and Field Evolution: The Growth of Interorganizational Collaboration in the Life Sciences" in the American Journal of Sociology (2005, Powell, White, Koput and Owen-Smith)
• “Ring Cohesion in Marriage and Social Networks” in Mathematiques et sciences humaines (2004)
• "The Navigability of Strong Ties: Small Worlds, Tie Strength and Network Topology" journal Complexity (2002, with Michael Houseman)
• "Controlled Simulation of Marriage Systems" in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (1999)
• "Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories" in Theory and Society (1997, with Lilyan A. Brudner)
• "Structure and Dynamics of the Global Economy: Network Analysis of International Trade 1965-1980" in Social Forces (1992, with David Smith)
• Graph and Semigroup Homomorphisms in Social Networks (1983, with Karl Reitz)
• Standard Cross-Cultural Sample in the 1969 journal Ethnology (with George P. Murdock, 2006 on-line edition reprinted with new annotations).

• Douglas R. White, Nataša Kejžar, and Laurent Tambayong. 2007. Discovering Oscillatory Dynamics of City-Size Distributions in World Historical Systems. Globalization as an Evolutionary Process: Modeling Global Change. Ed. by George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas, and William R. Thompson. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415773614

• Standard Cross-Cultural Sample

Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: Polygyny page

Standard Cross-Cultural Sample: Sexual Division of Labor page

• Homepage
• Structure and Dynamics eJournal (General editor)
• World Cultures eJournal (Founder and past Editor
• Complexity Sciences wiki (Founder and sysop)