Chris Danforth is co-director of the University of Vermont Complex Systems Center and the Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural and Technical Sciences. His background is in the application of Chaos Theory to weather and climate prediction. Danforth's current work is in computational social science, exploring human behavior through social media data.

He is the co-inventor of http://hedonometer.org, a socio-technical instrument measuring daily happiness based on 100 billion Twitter messages. He has also developed algorithms to identify predictors of depression from Instagram photos. His research has been covered by the New York Times, Science Magazine, and the BBC among others.