Noshir Contractor

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. He is also the former President of the International Communication Association (ICA) and a Trustee of the Web Science Trust.

Education
Contractor completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in communication at the University of Southern California in 1987. Prior to this he received a Master of Arts 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.

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 the host of the podcast "Untangling the Web". Professor Contractor has been at the forefront of three emerging interdisciplines: network science, computational social science and web science. He is investigating how social and knowledge networks form – and perform – in contexts including business, scientific communities, healthcare and space travel. His research has been funded continuously for 25 years by the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, NASA, DARPA, Army Research Laboratory and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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 "for contributions to advances in computational social science, network science and web science". In 2022, he was named Fellow of the Network Science Society. In 2023, he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Management.