Noshir Contractor:Biography
Name: Noshir Contractor
Title: Professor
Organization: Northwestern University
Email: nosh@northwestern.edu
Address: 2145 Sheridan Road, TECH D241, Evanston, Illinois 60208-3119
Phone Number: Work: 847-491-3669; Mobile: 217-390-6270
Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group.
He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective (i) disaster response networks, (ii) public health networks, (iii) massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) networks. His research program has been funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communication. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press in English and scheduled to be published by China Renmin University Press in simplified Chinese in 2008) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), and its Cyberinfrastructure extension CI-KNOW, a network recommender system to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.
