Dr. Noshir Contractor

Biography

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, where he is affiliated with multiple schools including the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication, and the Kellogg School of Management. He is also the director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group. With over 25 years of continuous research funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, as well as support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, NASA, DARPA, the Army Research Laboratory, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Contractor has established a prominent research agenda in the emerging fields of network science and computational social science. His work investigates the dynamics of social knowledge networks across various contexts, including business, scientific communities, and healthcare. His book, co-authored with Peter Monge, entitled "Theories of Communication Networks," won the Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association in 2003. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), he has received several prestigious awards throughout his career, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Contractor received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Research Interests