Members
Co-Directors
Marya Doerfel’s research focuses on qualities of social network relationships impact organizations and their relational environments. I analyze network interactions and the content of communication to develop models of grass roots and community level development. With few exceptions, my research takes place in the field. I have conducted communication and network assessments inside organizations and in areas in which major transformation has affected interorganizational alliances or when such alliances facilitate transformation. Such work has been conducted in Croatia, during the country’s political transformation, in New Orleans, USA, following the devastation of physical and social infrastructures as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and most recently, in Kabul Afghanistan, where media-sector organizations and their community are developing.
Matthew Weber is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information. He received his PhD in 2010 from the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California. He previously worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Technology, Entertainment and Media (CTEM) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Matthew’s research examines organizational change and adaptation, both internal and external, in response to new information communication technology. His recent work focuses on the transformation of the news media industry in the United States in reaction to new forms of media production. This includes a large-scale longitudinal study examining strategies employed by media organizations for disseminating news and information in online networks. Matthew utilizes mixed methods in his work, including social network analysis, archival research and interviews.
Faculty
Hana Shepherd
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.
Ingrid Erickson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her current research looks at the connection of mobile technology, social media and new forms of work practice and other types of organized behavior. She is also interested in sociotechnical innovations related to civic engagement and digital media and learning. She holds a Ph.D. from the Center for Work, Technology & Organization in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.
Nicholas Belkin is Distinguished Professor of Information Science in the Department of Library & Information Science, Rutgers University, where he has been since 1985. Previous to that appointment, he was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Science, The City University, London. He has held visiting positions at the University of Western Ontario, the Free University, Berlin, and the Institute for Systems Science, National University of Singapore. Professor Belkin was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tampere in 1996, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Croatia in 2003. He received his Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of London (University College). Professor Belkin has served as the Chair of the ACM SIGIR, and President of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). He is the recipient of the ASIST’s Outstanding Teacher award, its Research Award, and its Award of Merit, for outstanding contributions to Information Science. He is one of the founders of the “cognitive viewpoint” in information science, and is the co-author of one the first books to explicitly investigate and describe the process of interactive information retrieval. He is the author or co-author of over 200 journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters, and has been identified variously as the first or second most highly cited scholar in Library and Information Science. Professor Belkin has conducted ethnographic, sociological, behavioral and experimental research, including twelve years in the TREC Interactive Track. His most recent projects have focused on personalization of interaction with information, in particular, personalization of information retrieval based on searchers’ current and past behaviors, and on methods for evaluation of whole-session search. Professor Belkin’s research has been supported by many agencies, including NSF, Institute of Museum and Library Services, DARPA, NIST, US Department of Education, the British Library Research and Development Department, and NATO. His current research project, Automatic identification of information searcher intentions during an information seeking session, is supported by a Google Faculty Research Award.
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.
Post-Doctoral Research Assistants
Yannick C. Atouba (M.S., North Dakota State University; Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a post-doctoral scholar in organizational communication and organizational studies at the School of Communication and information at Rutgers University. His research focuses on interorganizational forms, processes, and outcomes, especially among nonprofits, and the examination of organizational stakeholder’s behaviors and attitudes, and their impact on organizations and organizing. He primarily uses quantitative methods and social network analysis to examine interorganizational phenomena and his research has been published in the Journal of Communication, Communication Yearbook, Management Communication Quarterly, and is forthcoming in many other outlets.
Graduate Students
Allie Kosterich is a first year PhD student at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. Focusing on organizational communication, she is primarily interested in how digital technology and surrounding culture affect processes of organizing. She is particularly focused on changes within media organizations and the implications on strategy, policy, and product. Allie comes to Rutgers after spending the past four years working in the media industry, producing television for Bloomberg News and managing a startup production staffing network in NYC.
Christine Goldthwaite is a PhD student in the School of Communication and Information (SC&I) at Rutgers University, joining the program 2011. Her primary research area is organizational communication with an interest in mediated communication, social media usage in the workplace, knowledge sharing, and virtual and creative team collaboration. Christine is a fellow in the Rutgers University Pre-Doctoral Leadership Development Institute and a member of the Collaboratory for Organizing and Social Media (COSM) research team at SC&I. She has studied communication throughout her scholarly career earning a B.A. in communication studies from Montclair State University, and a Masters in organizational communication from Rutgers University. Before returning to academia to pursue a graduate degree, Christine worked as a graphic designer in the advertising and publishing industries for twelve years. Christine is also the past president of the NJ chapter of the Association for Women in Communication.
Heewon Kim is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers, she studied at Yonsei University in South Korea, and worked at Daum Communications Corp. (search engine/portal company) and NCSOFT Corp. (3D game company) as a researcher. She mainly investigates how individuals mobilize various resources through social relations and the use of technology. Her current projects include the use of social media and its impact on knowledge sharing and social connectivity in organizations, social support mobilization using social media and mobile devices, and social network transformation in mixed-mode groups.
Jack Harris is a doctoral student at Rutgers School of Communication and Information and is a SC&I Fellow there. He was previously a Governor’s Executive Fellow at Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics and holds undergraduate degrees in History and Political Science. Prior to returning to academia Jack worked in strategy consulting, corporate & technology research, knowledge management and strategic communications in New York City and Minneapolis. He has served on the board of directors for national, state and local nonprofits and worked on congressional and statewide campaigns. Jack’s areas of focus include collaboration, decision-making, governance, and communication technologies with a focus on how interaction and collaboration are constructed across organizations struggling with complex, crisis-driven or intractable issues and decisions. He is particularly interested in issues of environmental risk and climate change adaptation, coastal management, community/organizational recovery after disaster, food systems and in questions of voice — whose voice gets heard and why in collaboration and decision-making.
Maggie Boyraz is a doctoral student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers, she earned MA from CUNY in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and worked at private and non profit organizations. Most recently she worked for a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) company managing client relations, training and development for multinational client companies. Her research interests lie in social implications of technology use in organizations, Intercultural Communication, OD (Organizational Development), use of new media to collaborate and share knowledge, global virtual teams as well as social media use.
Nik Ahmad Rozaidi is a Bank Negara Malaysia scholar with a 17-year industry experience in central banking, corporate communication, and web design. He earned his Master of Information degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, specializing in social computing; Master of Information Management from Universiti Teknologi Mara, Malaysia; as well as a bachelor’s degree in economics and accounting from University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Nik is researching the use of social media in organizations for knowledge sharing, specifically on the technology affordances and the characteristics of work that may benefit from the social media-generated information of connected users in the organization.
Punit (PT) Dadlani is currently a 3rd year doctoral student of Information Science at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers – New Brunswick. His main areas of research revolve around social justice, human information behavior/practices and the design of information environments within organizational contexts. PT has 10 years of work experience in the Financial IT sector working for companies like Citco and Morgan Stanley. He received two Bachelors degrees from Rutgers University – New Brunswick in Philosophy, English and ITI.
Seol Ki is a doctoral student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She earned her M.A. degree in Communication from Seoul National University. She has work experiences in government agency and broadcasting industry in South Korea. Her research interests include online community dynamics, social media use, and online gaming. Her research has been presented at major communication conferences such as ICA, NCA, AEJMC, and IAMCR.
Weixu Lu is a doctoral student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He received his M.A. and B.A. in sociology from East China Normal University, where he studied the issues of highly-educated urban immigrants and urban policy. His current research interests focus on the differentiated use of communication technologies, social networks, and ethnic social media. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/weixulu, and on Weibo at weibo.com/1879442047
Young Hoon is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Communication at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He earned his Master of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media from Michigan State University. His research interests include transactive memory system in global virtual teams, and use of social media in organizational contexts.
Ziad Matni
Graduate Student, NetSCI Lab