Members

Marya Doerfel conducts research on qualities of social network relationships impact organizations and their relational environments. She has conducted communication and network assessments inside organizations and in areas in which major transformation has affected stakeholder partnerships or when such partnerships facilitate transformation. Such work has been conducted in Croatia, during the country’s political transformation, in New Orleans, LA and Houston, TX, USA, following the devastation of physical and social infrastructures as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, respectively.

Jiawei Sophia Fu (PhD, Northwestern University) is an associate professor of Communication at the School of Communication and Information of Rutgers University. Her research interests center around organizational communication, social networks, digital technologies, and innovation for social impact. Fu is dedicated to applying mixed methods to answering one question: How can organizations more effectively tackle societal challenges?

Fu’s work has appeared in top peer-reviewed communication, nonprofit, and business journals, such as the Business & Society, Communication Research, Information, Communication, & Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She has won many dissertation, top paper, and outstanding article awards for her research from the Academy of Management, National Science Foundation, International Communication Association, Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, National Communication Association, and Association for Chinese Communication Studies. More recently, Fu received the Linda L. Putnam Early Career Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the International Communication Association in 2023.

Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova is an associate professor at the School of Communication & Information, Rutgers University. Her research examines the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information exposure/evaluation, and public opinion formation.

Ognyanova’s methodological expertise is in computational social science, network science, and survey research. She is the director of the Rutgers Computational Social Science Lab. Her recent work examines the links between misinformation exposure and political trust.  

Katherine Ognyanova is one of the founders and a principal investigator for the COVID States Project and the Civic Health and Institutions Project, two large multi-university initiatives exploring public attitudes to politics and health.

Matthew S. Weber is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. Matthew is an expert on media industries, social network analysis, organizational change and large-scale Web data. His recent work includes a large-scale longitudinal study examining how media organizations evolve with technology. Additional research includes an examination of technology in local news organizations, and the use of social media within organizations. Beyond his work on media and organizations, Dr. Weber is studying policymaking ecosystems to better understand how media organizations influence the policy process.

Dajung Woo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. DJ’s research focuses on how various organizations and groups manage relationships and collaborate successfully across their organizational and professional boundaries. Her work has examined communication behaviors — such as knowledge sharing, socialization, and identity work — to understand the social processes facilitating collective efforts in various organizational contexts including urban planning and healthcare.  She is an active member of and has won awards from the National and International Communication Associations (NCA, ICA) and the Academy of Management.

Paul McLean (Sociology) has focused on exploring the connections between multiple kinds of social networks—marriage networks, economic networks, and political patronage networks chiefly—and describing the cultural practices actors adopt to move within and across these networks. He has documented the development of elaborate strategies of self-presentation in Renaissance Florence—in articles (AJS 104,1:51-91 [1998]; CSSH 47, 3:638-64 [2005]), and in a book (The Art of the Network) from Duke University Press [2007]. He has studied Florentine market structure (Journal of Modern History 83, 1: 1-47 [2011] and AJS 111,4 [2006]) and the political organization of Polish elites (Theory and Society 33:167-212 [2004] as products of multiple-network dynamics. More recently he has participated in collaborative research exploring intersections of meaning and social network structure (Poetics 41: 122-50 [2013]; Social Networks 35: 499-513 [2013]). He has a growing interest in the social dynamics of videogame play, and in using a multiple-network perspective to understand the organization of academia. He has taught courses at Rutgers on social network analysis, social theory, political sociology, economic sociology, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of organizations.

Hana Shepherd is an Assistant Professor in Sociology. Her work focuses on three areas: the relationship between individual cognition, social norms, and social networks; cognitive and social psychological accounts of culture; and the relationship between organizational procedures and inequality. She uses diverse methods including network analysis, lab and field-based experiments, interviews, and archival research. She is currently studying network structure and network change using data from a field experiment that she co-directed in 56 middle schools in New Jersey, the Roots Program. The intervention program worked with randomly selected students and assessed how those students influenced their peers and the climate of the school as a whole. As part of the intervention assessment, the project collected complete longitudinal network data for all 56 schools. Her other projects use measures from cognitive psychology for the study of culture and behavior change. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from Princeton University. Before coming to Rutgers, she was a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University.