Contractor Receives Honors from ICA, INSNA

Northwestern Engineering’s Noshir Contractor, Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences and professor of industrial engineering and management sciences, has received the Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association (ICA), and the Simmel Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA).

The ICA Fellows Book Award recognizes work that has made a significant contribution to the scholarship of the communication field as well as the broader social sciences. Contractor was honored for his ground-breaking book, Theories of Communication Networks (Oxford University Press, 2003), coauthored with the University of Southern California’s Peter Monge. The book explores a multi-theoretical model that relates social science theories with different network properties. It is credited by many researchers in the field for having changed how communication network science is understood.

Contractor also received INSNA’s Simmel Award, which is given annually to the keynote speaker at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference. Contractor will deliver a keynote address during Sunbelt 2022 Australia next July in Cairns, Australia, related to the conference’s theme of “Social Networks, Disaster Recovery, and Environmental Governance in the Face of Climate Change.”

Contractor, who holds appointments in the McCormick School of Engineering, the Northwestern School of Communication, and the Kellogg School of Management, is a foremost researcher of network science, computational social science, and web science, specifically examining how social and knowledge networks form in business, scientific communities, healthcare, and space travel. He directs the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group.