Noshir Contractor


Noshir S. Contractor is a Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the director of Sonic Lab 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 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 Framework with Peter Monge described in detail in Theories of Communication Networks. He is one of the principal investigators of the Virtual Worlds Observatory project.

Recognition

In 2014, Professor Contractor was awarded the prestigious National Communication Association 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 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 and an ACM Fellow "for contributions to advances in computational social science, network science and web science".