Lena Uszkoreit is a second-year PhD student at USC. She received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Berlin University of the Arts in ‘Communication in Social and Economical Contexts’. Rather a novice to networks, Lena is intrigued by studying social interaction in virtual worlds and online games from a multi-methodological perspective. She is interested in the relationships of social capital, trust, and reciprocity of MMO players as well as in looking at online and offline social networks and how they intersect and overlap (or don’t).
Brian Uzzi is the Richard L. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He also directs the Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and is a professor of sociology and management science at the McCormick School of Engineering. His award winning and highly referenced research examines the role of complex systems and social networks in promoting outstanding human achievement, creativity, and crowd behavior. Brian has won 10 teaching awards and been on the faculty of Harvard University, INSEAD, University of Chicago, and UC Berkeley where he was the Warren E. and Carol Spieker Professor of Leadership. Media reports of his work have appeared in the WSJ, Newsweek, on Television, and in the New Yorker Magazine.
Balazs Vedres is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Central European University where he directs the Center for Network Science. His research furthers the agenda of understanding historical dynamics in network systems, with insights from historical sociology, social network analysis, and studies of complex systems in physics and biology. His research tackles questions of creativity in teams, the role of technology in civic activism, transnational networks and social movements, the political segregation of business networks, robustness in energy delivery networks, and organizational design. His research results were published in the top journals of sociology, attracting four major international awards over the past two years. His most recent book, “Networks in Social Policy Problems” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.
Rong Wang is a doctoral student at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Rong received her B.A. from School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University (P.R. China), and her M.A. in Communications and New Media from National University of Singapore. Her Master’s thesis examined, from a network perspective of collective action, online communities that focus on commons-based peer production. Before joining USC, Rong worked at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) with the Information Networks and Inclusion program, based in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests are focused on social network analysis, organizational communication, network dynamics, and evolutionary theories. Her research has been presented in international conferences including ICA, IAMCR, NCA, AoIR, and INSNA Sunbelt.
Cindy Weng is pursuing her Ph.D. in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University. Her interests and areas of expertise lay in the internet sector, particularly network analysis, social media, and virtual worlds. She is currently researching team formation and turnover by using multilevel modeling on EVE Online, one of the most elaborate MMORPGs ever created. She most recently presented a study on multilevel analysis of corporate turnover at the INSNA Sunbelt Conference 2013 in Hamburg, Germany. For the summer of 2013, Cindy interned at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA to study the effects of network visualizations on team behavior.
Anita Williams Woolley is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at the Tepper School of Business. She has a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University, where she also earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. At the Tepper School of Business, she teaches MBA and executive education courses on managing people and teams in organizations. Professor Woolley’s research and teaching interests include team collaboration, collective intelligence, and managing multiple team memberships. Professor Woolley’s research has been published in Science, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Small Group Research, among others and has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Institute, as well as private corporations.
Bei Yan is a second year PhD student at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, and a member of the Annenberg Networks Network. She’s interested in network forms of organizations, including inter-organizational networks, geographically distributed task teams and online communities. Her current research attempts to analyze structural features of open source software development communities and its social implications from an institutional theoretic perspective.
Y. Connie Yuan (PhD, University of Southern California) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research interests focus on knowledge management, social network analysis, intercultural communication, and computer-supported collaboration in distributed teams. Her works have been published in communication, information science and management journals, investigating how communication styles, intercultural differences, network ties, and usage of information and communication technologies can influence the development and effective function of transactive memory systems in work groups. She has received multiple grants from NSF and USDA to support her research.
Stephen J. Zaccaro is a professor of psychology at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. He is also an experienced leadership development consultant. He has written over 120 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports on group dynamics, team performance, leadership, and work attitudes. He has authored a book titled, The Nature of Executive Leadership: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis of Success (2001) and co-edited four other books, Occupational Stress and Organizational Effectiveness (1987), The Nature of Organizational Leadership: Understanding the Performance Imperatives Confronting Today’s Leaders (2001), Leader Development for Transforming Organizations (2004), and Multiteam systems: An Organization Form for Dynamic and Complex Environments (2012). He has also co-edited special issues of Leadership Quarterly (1991-1992) on individual differences and leadership, and a special issue for Group and Organization Management (2002) on the interface between leadership and team dynamics. He has served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on multiple research projects in the areas of multiteam systems, team performance, leader-team interfaces, leadership training and development, leader adaptability, executive leadership and executive coaching. He serves on the editorial board of The Leadership Quarterly, and he is an associate editor for Journal of Business and Psychology and Military Psychology. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and of the American Psychological Association, Divisions 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) and 19 (Military Psychology).