Chris Danforth is a computer scientist and a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Vermont. He is known for his work with the Hedonometer, a tool developed for measuring collective mood with sentiment analysis.^[1]

Danforth directs the Computational Story Lab at Vermont Complex Systems Center.^[2] His research job is focused on exploring human behavior through social media data.^[3]

In 2007, Danforth collaborated with Peter Sheridan Dodds to develop a tool to measure happiness that they called a "hedonometer." For creating it, a team directed by Danforth surveyed speakers of several languages to rate words on a scale of happiest to saddest.^[4]

In collaboration with social psychologist Andrew Reece, Danforth found that depressed people post photos on Instagram whose colors are cooler and darker than those of non-depressed people. In 2020, he found evidence that analyzing social media techniques might identify viral outbreaks.^[1]