Professor Contractor featured in NCA Communication Scholar video

Professor Contractor is one of four communication scholars featured in a video titled Grantseeking Basics: A Guide for the Communication Scholar prepared by the National Communication Association (NCA) and to be showcased at the NCA annual convention in New Orleans on Friday November 18 from 12:30-1:45 pm in LaGalerie 1 on the second floor of the Marriott Hotel, New Orleans. Video can be viewed at: http://www.natcom.org/Default.aspx?id=2147484475&libID=2147484475

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Two upcoming SONIC presentations

Two SONIC lab PhD researchers will present at this weekend’s Organizational Communication Mini Conference at the University of Missouri in Columbia.  Alina Lungeanu is presenting a paper titled “A network perspective on success in collaboration: Stop citing me for your own good?” exploring patterns of scientific collaboration.  Ryan Whalen will present “Government structure as multiplex network: Improving our understanding of inter-organizational relations” in which he explores ways to map and understand government structure.

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Oncofertility Consortium Conference

On Tuesday, September 13, Alina Lungeanu and Curie Chang will be presenting the following video poster at the 2011 Oncofertility Consortium® Conference – “Priorities for Sustainable Oncofertility Research and Patient Care”. The video features Oncofertility Consortium founder Theresa Woodruff, SONIC Lab director Noshir Contractor, and researchers Alina Lungeanu, Curie Chang, and Mengxiao Zhu speaking about how research in the Oncofertility discipline started and how it has evolved over the years.

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Maria Binz-Scharf SONIC Speaker Series

Maria Binz-ScharfProfessor Maria Binz-Scharf will be presenting “Collaborative Production of Scientific Knowledge”  on Thursday, September 15, 2011 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Research scientists have become increasingly dependent on collaborations across laboratories and organizations to maintain their productivity. However, growing specialization of individual laboratories works against a current drive towards understanding systems in the sciences. Consequently, there is a tension between the rising importance of collaborative efforts and the practical and structural challenges in establishing and managing such collaborations in the quest to understand our world. Drawing on ethnographic case studies of three academic research labs, we illustrate how scientific knowledge is produced in collaborations that are established and maintained through virtual organizations (VOs). As much as VOs can facilitate scientific work across time and space, they do not eradicate the social aspects (e.g. trust among scientists, institutional limitations, laboratory cultures) to scientific knowledge production.

Maria Binz-Scharf is Associate Professor of Management at the City College of CUNY, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. Her research examines how individuals search for and share knowledge to accomplish work. In particular, she is interested in understanding the role technology plays in processes of knowledge sharing and innovation. With the support of grants from the NSF and NIH, she has studied the knowledge networks of biologists, primary care physicians, and DNA forensic scientists.

Download the flyer here.

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Collaborative Production of Scientific Knowledge


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