Noshir Contractor, Professor of Speech Communication and Psychology, UIUC
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Noshir Contractor 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 Net- works Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology in 1983. He received a M.A. in Communication and a Ph.D. in Communication from University of Southern California, in 1986 and 1987, respectively. 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. 1 Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communication. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (coauthored 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 CIKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure Knowledge Networks On the Web), a Web-based suite of tools that leverages relational metadata to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure.
