Watch a full recording of the presentation below:
Welcome to SONIC, Neelam and Aaron!
We are thrilled to welcome two new members of the SONIC Research Group!
This year, we have two new Ph.D. Students: Aaron Campbell and Neelam Modi. Aaron just received his Master’s degree in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is joining the Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) program. Neelam, on the other hand, is joining the Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences (IEMS) program here at Northwestern after working as a consultant for the last two years.
Head over to their pages on our website to learn more about them.
Watch Noshir and Leslie’s Welcome Plenary at INGRoup 2020!

Last week, Professors Noshir Contractor and Leslie DeChurch presented a welcome plenary at #INGROUP2020. The talk covers some of our findings from our Enterprise Social Media (ESM) project, particularly the changes in which Covid-19 imposed on organizational communication and network ties. If you missed the talk, check out a recording of their talk here!
Thank you @INGRoupOfficial for recording the plenary!
New Data Science Interns this Fall!
This quarter, we have two new data science interns at the SONIC Research Group: Aida Baimenova and Piyush Kalkute. Both of them took Professor Noshir’s Social Network Analytics class in the past and have been interested in social networks ever since.
Aida Baimenova is a junior at the IEMS department. She will be working with our grad student Kyosuke on Project RED, a multi-team problem-solving exercise designed for NASA to help their effort in sending a multidisciplinary team to Mars in the next 20 years. Piyush is a graduate student pursuing Computer Science. He will be working with our Research Assistant Professor Alina and our second-year graduate student Jasmine on the Science of Team Science project that aims to understand and assemble cross-boundary teams to conduct clinical and translational science.
Head over to our Data Science Intern page here to learn a little bit more about them!
Noshir and Leslie will be delivering the Welcome Plenary at INGroup 2020

SONIC at OCMC 2020
Although this year’s OCMC 2020 have a different feel (i.e. virtual conference), we are delighted to announce that four of our graduate students (Diego Gomez-Zara, Jasmine Wu, Kyosuke Tanaka, and Niloufar Izadinia) were presenting there!
Diego Gomez-Zara kicks off our SONIC speakers on Friday (09/25) at OCMC 2020 with his poster presentation titled “Do I know you? The effects of social capital on self-assembled teams.”
On Saturday (09/26), Jasmine presented her work on “Status and network mobilization in organizations during the times of COVID-19,” while Niloufar presented her work on “New metrics for evaluating individual and team performance in multi-team systems” during poster session.
On Sunday (09/27), our 6th year graduate student Kyosuke Tanaka also presented his talk on “Positional and Dispositional Factors That Predict Who Commits Social Network Routing Errors and Who Learns from Them” during the Organizing Online and Offline Session.


Find out more about the conference here.
Check out our latest publication!
We are beyond thrilled to share our latest publication at the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Patent Similarity Data and Innovation Metrics.
Congratulations to authors Drs. Ryan Whalen, Alina Lungeanu, Leslie de Church, and Noshir Contractor!
Citation: Whalen, R., Lungeanu, A., DeChurch, L. and Contractor, N. (2020), Patent Similarity Data and Innovation Metrics. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 17: 615-639. doi:10.1111/jels.12261
New NSF funded project!
Excited to share that we have a new project funded by the National Science Foundation to study teaming in the time of Covid-19: understanding how technology affordances can enable collaboration during sudden workplace disruption.
Congratulations to PIs Noshir Contractor, co-I Leslie DeChurch, and collaborators Paul Leonardi, Jackie Ng Lane, and Michael Johnson!
Read more about the project here: bit.ly/3kmiKbt
Noshir delivered talks at AoM OCIS
Noshir delivered 2 talks at online sessions of Academy of Management 2020:
“Using AI to turbocharge organizational network analysis”
“Unravelling the sequential structural signatures of success in human agent teams:
CSCW 2020 Paper acceptance
Sharing some wonderful news – We have a paper accepted to CSCW 2020!! Congrats to lead author Diego Gómez-Zará and his co-authors Dr. Leslie DeChurch and Dr. Noshir Contractor.
The paper is titled “Model of Online Team Assembly (MOTA): A Conceptual Framework for Understanding How Teams Emerge in Online Spaces.” Can’t wait to share it with everyone soon!