Social media yields constant online chatter and offers up unparalleled access to society’s diverse views and beliefs. Leading an emerging field, Masoud Makrehchi, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, is one of Canada’s first researchers to mine and analyze social media data to help solve real-world problems. Working with law enforcement data, Dr. Makrehchi’s novel research uses social media to predict the crime rate direction in neighbourhoods. Extracting gold from an abundance of social media babble, he is developing unique algorithms and predictors for analytics to build better, safer communities. Along those lines, his research also focuses on modelling bullying behaviour in small communities. He aims to create a universal tool for modelling and simulation of dynamic social agent networks; allowing analysts, teachers, and law enforcement officers to analyze bullying behaviour, impact and consequences; and generate prediction models across ethnicity, gender, and disability. In collaboration with the University of Ottawa, Dr. Makrehchi is using social media to understand the stock market movement, particularly during initial public offering (IPO). He is analyzing Twitter feeds to determine public sentiment for pricing IPOs, and identifying this correlation to stock market success. A staunch advocate for social justice, Dr. Makrechi joined Ontario Tech University in July 2012, following his role as a senior research scientist in Research and Development for Thomson Reuters in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, where he served as a consultant in 2013. From 2002 to 2007, he was a research assistant in the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Lab, and the Learning Objects Repositories NETwork (LORNET) a five-year, NSERC-funded project; both in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. While there, he earned his Doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007. Dr. Makrehchi gained international industry experience as a systems analyst and project manager for ICT projects in various organizations including Irankhodro Automotive Industries in Tehran, Iran. In 1994, he received his Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Shiraz University in Shiraz, Iran, and in 1991, he obtained his Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Iran University of Science and Technology.