Faculty & Contributors
A Community of Thought Leaders
CSSI is proud to bring together so many top experts in the fields of complex sciences. The core of our team is made up of professors, doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows at the Kellogg School of Management and Northwestern University, but our community of collaborators spans the globe. Here’s a look at the team behind the science of science, as well as key contributors and supporters.
Research Highlights
Discover our faculty's latest explorations in the field of science of science. Published in Kellogg Insight, the Kellogg School of Management's magazine on faculty research and expertise, this collection of work delves into such areas as teamwork, collaboration, innovation, careers, and gender dynamics.
The Center is an extraordinary investment, bringing together world-leading researchers to decode innovation and the progress of knowledge.
Leadership Network
Dashun Wang, Director
Professor of Management & Organizations / Professor of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences / Core faculty at Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems (NICO)
Professor Wang’s research focuses on the science of science. He joined the faculty at Kellogg in 2016 after teaching at Pennsylvania State University and leading a big data initiative at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He also holds appointments at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science and NICO.
Luis Amaral
Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering / Professor of Physics & Astronomy / Co-Director, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) Faculty
Professor Amaral conducts and directs research that provides insight into the emergence, evolution and stability of complex social and biological systems. He holds appointments at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Feinberg School of Medicine.
James Evans
Professor / Director, Knowledge Lab / Faculty Director, Masters Program in Computational Social Science, University of Chicago
Professor Evans’s research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing. At the University of Chicago, he is Director of Knowledge Lab, which has collaborative, granting and employment opportunities. Evans also founded and now directs on the Computational Social Science program at Chicago, and sponsors an associated Computational Social Science workshop.
Santo Fortunato
Professor / Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Indiana University
Professor Fortunato’s research areas are network science and computational social science, and aims to detect community structures in networks, analyze and model social and information networks, identify citation patterns, and more. Fortunato joined the faculty at Indiana University in 2016.
Benjamin Jones
Gordon and Llura Gund Family Professor of Entrepreneurship / Professor of Strategy / Faculty Director, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Kellogg
Professor Jones is faculty director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Kellogg, which equips leaders to drive the kind of innovation, entrepreneurship and growth that matters in today’s world. His research focuses on innovation and creativity, and he has done work on global economic development, including the roles of education, climate and national leadership in explaining the wealth and poverty of nations.
Brian Uzzi
Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change / Co-Director, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) Faculty / Director, Kellogg Architectures of Collaboration Initiative (KACI)
Professor Uzzi is a globally recognized teacher, consultant and speaker on leadership, social networks, data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has lectured and advised companies and governments around the world and has been on or visited the faculties of INSEAD, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University.
Researchers
Sirag Erkol
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Şirag Erkol is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He has a Ph.D. in Informatics from Indiana University Bloomington and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University. His research interests lie in the science of science and network science. His work focuses on understanding the dynamics of scientific careers and academic networks using varying research methods.
Alexander Furnas
Research Assistant Professor, Kellogg School of Management
Alexander C. Furnas PhD (Zander), is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He has a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He researches the political economy of information, with a focus on the production, dissemination and uptake of science and expertise in the policymaking process. His dissertation examines how congressional staffers evaluate and use privately provisioned information produced by outside organizations. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Legislative Studies Quarterly, among others. More generally, he studies the use of information, science, and expertise in policymaking, interest groups, and elite political behavior using survey, text analysis and network methods.
Jian Gao
Research Assistant Professor, Kellogg School of Management
Jian Gao is a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) at the Kellogg School of Management and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) at Northwestern University. He obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. His research interests lie in the science of science, computational socioeconomics, network science, and economic complexity. His recent work focuses on measuring the disparities in exposure to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and estimating the benefits of AI in science and innovation.
Bernard Koch
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Bernard Koch is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation in the Kellogg School of Management. Starting in 2024, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. His research is focused on organizational issues in scientific fields (particularly AI research and psychology) and their ethical and epistemic outcomes. He also has interests in cultural evolution, machine learning, and causal inference. His work has been published in NeurIPS, WWW , Soc. Methodology, Soc. Methods & Res, and Science, among other venues.
Zihang Lin
PhD Student, McCormick School of Engineering and Kellogg School of Management
Rui Pan
Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Rui Pan is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) at the Kellogg School of Management. She is currently an MA candidate in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago, with affiliations at the Knowledge Lab. She completed her bachelor's degree in Economics and Philosophy at Peking University in 2020. Her research interests lie in understanding team collaboration and innovation with computational methods, including content analysis, social network analysis, and experiments. She is actively seeking an opportunity as a Ph.D. student starting in Fall 2023.
Yifan Qian
Research Assistant Professor, Kellogg School of Management
Yifan Qian is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His current research focus is the science of science and combines theories and methods from network science, machine learning, data science, and sociology. By leveraging large-scale datasets encompassing scientific funding, publications, societal impacts, and confidential university data on technology transfer and grant applications, his current work aims to broaden our definition and measurement of innovations while identifying new gaps and opportunities for innovations at research institutions.
Erzhuo Shao
PhD Student, McCormick School of Engineering
Erzhuo Shao is a Ph.D. Candidate at the McCormick School of Engineering, majoring in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences. His research interests lie in computational social science, complex networks, and machine learning. He received a B.Eng. degree and an M.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University. He also received an M.S.E from Johns Hopkins University.
Giorgio Tripodi
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Giorgio Tripodi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He received a Ph.D. in Data Science from Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy). He was previously a research fellow at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy) and a visiting scholar at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (‘20). His research interests lie at the intersection between science of science, network science, and economics of innovation, focusing on climate-related technologies and how innovators move and interact in the knowledge space. He received an M.Sc. in economics from Bocconi University in 2015
Binglu Wang
Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Binglu Wang is a Ph.D. student in Management & Organizations (MORS) at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, with affiliations at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Her research involves computational social science, technology & innovation, and social networks, with a focus on understanding how community collapses from large-scale datasets. She received her bachelor's degree in information management and information system from Peking University in 2019.
Yifang Wang
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Yifang Wang is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Center for Science of Science (CSSI) and Innovation (CSSI) at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research interests lie broadly in visual analytics and data storytelling, especially in the fields of computational social science and digital humanities. Before that, she obtained a Ph.D. degree in computer science from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST, 2022) and a B.Eng. degree in software engineering from Zhejiang University (ZJU, 2018).
Sijia Wei
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management
Sijia Wei is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Integrated Health Services and Outcomes Research Fellowship Program at the Center for Education in Health Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. She earned her Ph.D. in Nursing Science from Duke University and is a registered nurse and public health nurse with clinical experience in community-based health care services (i.e., long-term care, home health care, rehabilitation, and hospice). Her research focuses on care coordination processes in care transitions across settings and over time by evaluating relational processes and social mechanisms essential to care coordination using social network analysis and large datasets such as electronic health records. She seeks to understand the complex systemic drivers of health disparities for adults with chronic illnesses and disabilities in the community and aims to improve care efficiency, health equity, and patient outcomes by enhancing care coordination processes.
Diana Amirbekova
Visiting Scholar, Kellogg School of Management
Diana Amirbekova is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Science of Science and Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Diana has a Ph.D. in Management from Kazakh British Technical University. She is currently a holder of the research scholarship awarded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Kazakhstan. Her research interests lie in scientometrics, science of science and knowledge management. Her work focuses on research productivity, science development and research policies in Kazakhstan.
ALUMNI
Yian Yin
Research Assistant Professor, Kellogg School of Management, '22-23
First Appointment: Assistant Professor at Cornell University
Seokkyun Woo
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '22-23
First Appointment: Assistant Professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
Taegyoon Kim
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '22-23
First Appointment: Assistant Professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
Wenyuan Liu
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '21-23
First Placement: Geophysicist at CGG
Nima Dehmamy
Research Assistant Professor, Kellogg School of Management, '19-22
First Placement: Research Staff Member at IBM
Diego Gómez-Zará
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '21-'22
First Appointment: Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame
Woo Seong Jo
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '19-20
First Placement: Samsung Economic Research Institute
Zihang Lin
Visiting Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management '21-22
Current: PhD student, McCormick School of Engineering, CSSI
Lu Liu
PhD student, Pennsylvania State University and visiting predoctoral student at CSSI and NICO
First Placement: Data Scientist at Robinhood
Zifang Liu
Post-Baccalaureate Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management '21-22
Suman Kalyan Maity
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '18-21
First Appointment: Assistant Professor at Missouri S&T
Minsu Park
Research Fellow, Kellogg School of Management, '19-20
First Appointment: Assistant professor, NYU-Abu Dhabi
Yang Wang
Visiting Professor, Kellogg School of Management, '18
First Appointment: Full professor, Xi’an Jiaotong University (China)
Lingfei Wu
First Appointment: Assistant professor, iSchool, University of Pittsburgh
Researcher Network
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Pierre Azoulay
Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Albert Laszlo-Barabisi
Robert Gray Doge Professor of Network Science, Northeastern University
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Nicola Bianchi
Assistant Professor, Kellogg School of Management
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Jillian Chown
Associate Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
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Jeanneate Colvyas
Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and Associate Professor of Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, Associate Professor and Executive Board Member, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Associate Professor of Management & Operations, Kellogg School of Management (Courtesy)
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Noshir Contractor
Professor of Behavioral Sciences, Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering
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Leslie Dechurch
Professor of Communication Studies, Northwestern School of Communication
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Ying Ding
Bill & Luis Suit Professor, School of Information
Adjunct Professor at Department of Health, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin -
Eli Finkel
Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management / Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
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Steve Franconeri
Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences / Professor of Design, McCormick School of Engineering (Courtesy) / Director, Northwestern Cognitive Science Program, Professor of Leadership, Kellogg School of Management (Courtesy)
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C. Lee Giles
David Reese Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University
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Jason Hartline
Associate Professor of Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
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Danqi Hu
Assistant Professor of Accounting Information & Management, Kellogg School of Management
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Nour Kteily
Professor, Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
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Vincent Lariviere
Professor of Information Science, University of Montreal
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Han Liu
Associate Professor of Statistics and Computer Science, McCormick School of Engineering
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Robert McDonald
Professor of Finance and Gaylord Freeman Distinguished Chair in Banking, Kellogg School of Management
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Filippo Mezzanotti
Assistant Professor of Finance, Kellogg School of Management
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Sam Molyneux
GM, Meta, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
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William Ocasio
James F. Towey Professor of Business and Leadership and Director, Illinois Strategic Organization Initiative
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Adam Pah
Clinical Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Associate Director, Research Assistant Professor, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
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Dimitris Papanikolaou
Professor of Finance, Kellogg School of Management
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Hatim Rahman
Assistant Professor, Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
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Iyad Rahwan
Director, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
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Luis Rayo
Erwin P. Nemmers Professor of Strategy, Kellogg School of Management
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Lauren Rivera
Associate Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Associate Professor of Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (Courtesy) -
Roberta Sinatra
Associate Professor, IT University of Copenhagen
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H. Eugene Stanley
Professor of Physics, Boston University
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Nicole Stephens
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Associate Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management / Associate Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (Courtesy)
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Thomas Stoeger
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Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, Northwestern University / Potocsnak Longevity Institute, Simpson Querrey Lung Institute for Translational Science, Northwestern University
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Jie Tang
Professor, Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University
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Lav Varshney
Associate Professor, University of Illinois
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Ludo Waltman
Professor of Quantitative Science Studies, Leiden University
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Kuansan Wang
Managing Director, Microsoft Research Outreach
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Adam Waytz
Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
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Jevin West
Associate Professor, University of Washington
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Teresa K. Woodruff
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Michigan State University
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Hyejin Youn
Associate Professor of Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Core Administration Team
Krisztina Eleki
Administrative Director of Operations for the Kellogg Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) and the Northwestern Innovation Institute (NI Institute)
Krisztina oversees the administrative, operational, financial, and business functions that support research programs and the overall mission.
Alyse Freilich
Assistant Director of Content and Communications for the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI).
Alyse leads content development and communication efforts for the CSSI, overseeing a wide range of writing and editorial initiatives. Her role involves close collaboration with researchers to distill complex scientific concepts into compelling, accessible content that resonates with diverse audiences.
Feda Jarad, Program Coordinator for the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI).
Feda supports the administrative functions by managing logistics, overseeing financial processes, and coordinating with the growing research team to ensure alignment with the center’s functions. She facilitates day-to-day operations by handling communications and streamlining workflows to support research and program activities.