BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY STATEMENT FOR NOSHIR S. CONTRACTOR

Noshir Contractor (www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Nosh) is a Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Department of Psychology, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Research Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Co-Director of the Age of Networks Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His research program, funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, is investigating factors that lead to formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked knowledge networks in 21st century organizational forms.
 

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communication.  His book titled “Theories of Communication Networks” (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association.  He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a community-ware web-based software  (http://iknow.spcomm.uiuc.edu) and Blanche, a software program to simulate the dynamics of social networks (http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Teclab/Blanche/).  His papers have received Top Paper awards from the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. In 2000 he was awarded the Outstanding Member Award by the Organizational Communication Division of the International Communication Association. He has served on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Science, and the World Wide Web Electronic Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 
 

He has served on numerous review panels for the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Digital Society and Technology Program, Information Technology Research Program and Digital Government Program. At the request of the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission’s Information Society and Technology Program, he has organized several workshops and panels to foster international collaborations in the area of information and communication technologies.   He has consulted with Boeing, Charles Schwab, Fiat, Illinois Power, McKinsey Management Consulting, Merrill Lynch, Michigan Consolidated, National Cancer Institute, Paramount Pictures, Procter & Gamble, the Utah Transit Authority, and Vodafone. He has developed graduate and undergraduate “virtual” courses on "Emerging Technologies in the Workplace" webcast and cablecast by Jones International University. Internationally, Professor Contractor has also conducted workshops on the management of knowledge networks in China, Finland, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.