He co-founded and chaired the Social Networks PhD program and within the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences chaired the Social Dynamics and Complexity[4] research group and the UC four-campus videoconference group.

[5] He was on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute,[6] was on the governing Council of the European Complex Systems Society,[7] 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 continued as editor-in-chief.

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.

White's Main page hosts a public server, that if used externally at http://SocSciCompute.ss.uci.edu, offers ethnographic data, variables and tools for inference with R scripts by Dow (2007) and Eff and Dow (2009) in an NSF supported Galaxy (http://getgalaxy.org) framework (https://www.xsede.org) for instructors, students and researchers to do cross-cultural research modeling with controls for Galton's problem using Standard Cross-Cultural Sample variables at https://web.archive.org/web/20160402201432/https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9256203/SCCScodebook.txt.