Noshir S. Contractor is an Indian-American network scientist who is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and the director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

. He is also the President-Elect-Select of th
International Communication Association (ICA)
and a Trustee of the

Web Science Trust The Web Science Trust (WST) is a UK Charitable Trust with the aim of supporting the global development of Web science. It was originally started in 2006 as a joint effort between MIT and University of Southampton to formalise the social and te ...

Education

Contractor completed his

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

degree in Communication at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

in 1987. Prior to this he received a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Th ...

in Communication also from USC in 1986 and a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (Chennai) in 1983.

Career

Research

He has published more than 250 research papers in the area of social communication networks. He is known for the Multi-Theoretical Multi-Level (MTML) Framework with Peter Monge described in detail in ''Theories of Communication Networks''. He was one of the principal investigators of the Virtual Worlds Observatory project along with Jaideep Srivastava, Marshall Scott Poole and Dmitri William.

Recognition

In 2014, Professor Contractor was awarded the prestigious National Communication Association (NCA) Distinguished Scholar Award, honoring "a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication." In 2015, Professor Contractor was honored with the title of International Communication Association (ICA) Fellow, in recognition of "distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication." In 2018, he was awarded a Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. In 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

"for contributions to advances in

computational social science Computational social science is the academic sub-discipline concerned with computational approaches to the social sciences. This means that computers are used to model, simulate, and analyze social phenomena. Fields include computational economics ...

, network science and web science".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Contractor, Noshir Living people American psychologists 1959 births Indian emigrants to the United States American people of Indian descent American people of Parsi descent University of Southern California alumni Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Network scientists