A huge congratulations goes out to Diego Gómez-Zará for his PhD defense! His dissertation focuses on examining how recommender systems help people assemble teams. The dissertation committee included SONIC’s own Noshir Contractor, as well as Leslie DeChurch and Haoqi Zhang of Northwestern University, in addition to Melissa Valentine of Stanford University.

Congratulations to SONIC Director Noshir Contractor for his honors both with the Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association and with the Simmel Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis! More on this in the following Northwestern McCormick School of Engineering article: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/industrial/news-events/news/articles/2021/contractor-receives-honors-from-ica-insna.html

SONIC Director Noshir Contractor will be presenting a keynote on “Reimagining Theories and Methods to Understand and Enable the Algorithmically Infused Changing Nature of Work” for National University of Singapore’s Global Research Forum 2021! Be sure to join the forum running from August 23-25, with Noshir’s presentation on August 24.

Register here: https://nus-sg.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QYUf8OIbTo6fcGaEFpx7Ew?_x_zm_rtaid=Voe3Q3vPTcOXJ-Z14nyzqA.1629392617169.21390693421fefc137a8df623d8f77e4&_x_zm_rhtaid=136

Congratulations to Professor Contractor for his appointment as Associate Editor of PNAS Nexus, a National Academy of Sciences journal from 2021 to 2024! Noshir will be the Associate Editor for Social/Political Sciences and the rest of the Editorial Board can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/pages/editorial-board

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Contractor presented at the U.S. National Academies Committee on Addressing Misleading Information and Infectious Disease Outbreaks and Biological Threats. His presentation, titled “Increasing Awareness about Network Awareness in Scientific Networks,” focuses on why a lack of “Network Awareness” may lead to failures in scientific networks and how technological affordances and algorithmic recommendations can make scientific networks more effective. The virtual presentation can be found here:

Following Diego’s presentation at the 81st Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management was Noshir’s presentation entitled “Unravelling the sequential structural signatures of success in human agent teams.” Here’s to another successful virtual conference and hopefully more in person meetings soon!

Congratulations to Diego Gómez-Zára for his presentation at the 81st Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management! His presentation is titled “Do I know you? The effects of social capital on self-assembled groups.” Keep an eye out for more presentations from SONIC lab members at this conference!

Another successful summer lab meeting in the books! SONIC had the second lab meeting of the summer today and we were so glad to see so many familiar faces over zoom. There were many big announcements during this meeting as well as exciting plans for this upcoming fall when we will hopefully be in person as much as possible!

It was so great to see so many familiar faces virtually for SONIC’s second lab meeting of the summer! While we are virtual for now, we are hoping to be able to meet in person at some point during the academic year, which will be the first time some of us see each other face to face!

Congratulations to SONIC Director Noshir Contractor for winning the 2022 Simmel Award, awarded to the keynote speaker at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference! This award is named for Georg Simmel (1858-1918), a German sociologist who was a pioneer in social structures and social network analysis research. We are very much looking forward to hearing Dr. Contractor’s presentation and attending the conference this July in Cairns, Australia! More information on this award and past recipients can be found here:

https://insna.org/simmel-award##