Organizing Committee

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communications and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research center and holds a PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California and a Bachelor’s Degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (Chennai).

Leslie DeChurch is Associate Professor of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research examines leadership, teams, multiteam systems, and social networks. Professor DeChurch is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and she leads the DELTA laboratory (Developing Effective Leaders, Teams, & Alliances) at Georgia Tech. She has a PhD in Industrial & Organizational Psychology from Florida International University and a B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Miami.

Alanna Lazarowich is the Senior Director of the Architectures of Collaboration Initiative (KACI) at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is part of Kellogg’s Leadership Team. Alanna received her MBA in strategic management, finance and international business from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in political science and Spanish from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Laura Nelson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and is a research affiliate at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. She has a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. She researches social movements using computational text analysis.

Laura Norén is a Moore/Sloan Postdoctoral Associate at New York University’s Center for Data Science. She holds a PhD in Sociology from New York University and studies collaboration among creative workers and data scientists using ethnographic and computational methods.

Brian Uzzi is a globally recognized scientist, teacher, consultant and speaker on leadership, social networks, and new media. He is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He also co-directs NICO, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, is the faculty director of the Kellogg Architectures of Collaboration Initiative (KACI), and holds professorships in Sociology at the Weinberg College of Arts of Sciences and in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering. Brian has a a PhD in Sociology and a MS from State University of New York, Stony Brook. He also holds a MS in Organizational Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in Business Economics from Hofstra University.