Alexandros Nathan is a second year PhD student in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University, and a member of the SONIC Lab. His research interests span the areas of Analytics, Social Network Analysis and Optimization. Alexandros is currently working with Professors Noshir Contractor and Sanjay Mehrotra on a new data driven approach for optimizing team performance. This new method will also be generic enough to be applied to various multi-objective optimization settings. In his free time, Alexandros enjoys playing tennis.
Julia Neidhardt is a researcher at the E-Commerce Group (Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems) at the Vienna University of Technology. She is enrolled in a PhD program at the same University; and her research focuses on the modeling and the analysis of online networks in the context of tourism. Julia obtained a MSc degree in Mathematics with specializations in Number Theory and Discrete Mathematics from the University of Vienna. At the moment Julia is a visiting scholar at the SONIC Research Group at Northwestern University. Here she is studying the performance of teams in virtual worlds.
Poong Oh is a Ph.D. candidate, at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. His research interests focus on the evolutionary processes of complex adaptive systems, including human communication networks, inter-organizational networks, group information processing and decision making, and collective action. One of his articles was published in International Journal of Communication (The Functionality of Social Tagging as a Communication System, coauthored with Peter Monge). His dissertation title is “A General Framework for the Underlying Mechanisms of the Evolution of Communication Networks.” Currently, he is working on several research projects in Annenberg Networks Network.
Gary M. Olson is Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine. His research investigates the socio-technical factors involved in geographically-distributed science and engineering. He is a co-editor and co-author of a number of chapters in the book Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (MIT Press, 2008)which includes a theory of remote collaboration and a number of case examples. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the CHI Academy, and a winner of the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award (with Judy).
Judith S. Olson is Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Science with appointments also in the Merage School of Business and the School of Social Ecology at the University of California at Irvine. Her research interests are in the area of distance work, doing fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and agent-based modeling of collaborations in science, engineering, non-profits, and corporations. She is co-author of a number of chapters in the book, Scientific Collaboration on the Internet, including the theory of remote scientific collaboration and several case studies. She is an ACM Fellow, a member of the CHI Academy, a winner of the CHI Lifetime Achievement Award (with Gary), and winner of the ACM Athena Award.
Edward T. Palazzolo is the Associate Director of the SONIC Lab at Northwestern University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2003) and held faculty positions at The Ohio State University and Arizona State University. Dr. Palazzolo’s research focuses on the interrelations between communication and knowledge networks and their impact on team performance in organizational settings through social network analysis, multilevel modeling, and computational modeling. The range of organizational settings he studies include for-profit, not-for-profit, education, government, military, terrorist, aerospace, virtual, international, and rapid-design teams.
Alex `Sandy’ Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives, and is a founding member of the Advisory Boards for Nissan, Motorola Mobility, Telefonica, and a variety of start-up firms. He has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health. In 2012 Forbes named Sandy one of the `seven most powerful data scientists in the world’, along with Google founders and the CTO of the United States, and in 2013 he won the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review. He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features on BBC World, Discover and Science channels. His most recent book is `Honest Signals,’ published by MIT Press.
Walter W. Powell, Professor of Education (and) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, Public Policy, and Communication at Stanford University. He works in the areas of organization theory, economic sociology, and the sociology of science. His interests focus on the processes through which knowledge is transferred across organizations, and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation and of institutions in codifying ideas. He is the author or editor of Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing, with Lewis Coser and Charles Kadushin (Basic Books, 1982); Getting Into Print: The Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing (U. of Chicago Press, 1985); The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, with Paul DiMaggio (U. of Chicago Press, 1991); Private Action and the Public Good, with Elisabeth Clemens (Yale U. Press, 1997); and The Nonprofit Sector, with Richard Steinberg (Yale U. Press, 2006). His most recent book, with John Padgett, is The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (Princeton U. Press, 2012). He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from SUNY – Stony Brook, and previously taught at Yale, MIT, and the University of Arizona. He holds honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and the Helsinki School of Economics, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science.
Ray Reagans is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management and Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Reagans studies the origin and influence of social capital on knowledge transfer, learning rates, and overall team performance. More specifically, he examines how demographic characteristics such as race, age, and gender affect the development of network relations. He also considers how particular network structures affect performance outcomes, including the transfer of knowledge among individuals and the productivity of research and development teams. Reagans holds a BA in sociology and economics from Brown University and a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.
Daniel M. Romero’s research focuses on the empirical and theoretical analysis of Social and Information Networks. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms that control network evolution, information diffusion, and user interactions in online social networks. In his research, Daniel aims to complement the methods used in sociology with approaches that draw on large data sets from the Web, mathematical models, and new algorithms. Using these tools, Daniel’s research focuses on validating existing social theories at large scale and discovering new ones. While much of Daniel’s work is academically motivated, the results of his research have important implications for the development of useful applications such as user influence ranking, friend recommender systems, and spam detection. Daniel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Networks (NICO). He obtained his Ph.D in Applied Mathematics at Cornell University in 2012.
Aaron Schecter is currently a second year PhD. candidate at Northwestern University in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science. He is a member of the SONIC research group, where he is involved in the ongoing MTS study. Aaron’s current research is focused on relational event modeling for team communication. Additionally, he is interested in statistical modeling, optimization, and simulation.
Cuihua Cindy Shen (PhD, University of Southern California) is an Assistant Professor at the Emerging Media and Communication Program, University of Texas at Dallas. Her research and teaching interests revolve around the social and psychological impacts of digital media, particularly how people create, maintain and are influenced by social networks in online worlds. Her work has been published in journals including Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, and Management Communication Quarterly.
Andrew J. Slaughter is a research scientist in the Foundational Science Research Unit at the U. S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI). He is responsible for helping to manage and develop ARI’s portfolio of research on topics related to organizational effectiveness and culture, including topics related to network science. Dr. Slaughter’s primary areas of expertise are in the areas of network science, psychometrics, individual differences, and leadership. His past research experience includes topics related to psychological test development and validation; the measurement and statistical analysis of cognitive social structures; statistical models for multilevel and longitudinal data; and the application of social network analysis to studying leadership, collaboration, influence, and organizational attitudes in organizations. Dr. Slaughter received his Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Texas A&M University. He is a member of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) and the Psychometric Society.
Ned Smith is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology at Northwestern University. His research is on the construction and consequences of organizational identity, with particular empirical emphasis on financial markets. He draws on sociological and network-based theories of markets to develop and test new identity-based models of decision-making, organizational behavior, and market evolution. A second avenue of Ned’s research works to connect research on cognitive processes and network theories of social capital to better understand how people utilize (and squander) the resources available to them in their social networks.
Bonnie Spring is Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology, and Psychiatry, Director of the Center for Behavior and Health, and Co-Program Leader for Cancer Prevention at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She studies interventions to promote healthful lifestyle change, including treatments that incorporate technology. Her research on behavioral risk factors (smoking, poor-quality diet, physical inactivity, obesity) has been supported continuously for more than 30 years chiefly by the National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She directs the Science of Team Science program at NUCATS and is interested in optimizing networks to enhance outcomes.
Sophia Sullivan is a fourth year Ph.D. student in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern. As a member of the SONIC Lab, she has participated in a variety of projects including the development of metrics for analyzing team ecosystems, simulation of creativity in teams, and studying gold farming in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Her current projects include simulating the development of leadership reliance networks in Multi-Team Systems and simulating of the evolution of a scientific field using Agent-Based Models.
Boleslaw K. Szymanski is the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor and the Director of the ARL Social and Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in 1976. He published over 300 scientific articles, is a foreign member of the National Academy of Science in Poland and an IEEE Fellow and was a National Lecturer for the ACM. In 2009, he received the Wilkes Medal from the British Computer Society and the honorific title of Presidential Professor from the Republic of Poland. His current research interests focus on network science with focus on technology-based social networks and computer networks.