Core Faculty

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.

Marya Doerfel

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

Sophia Fu’s research interests center around organizations, social networks, information and communication technologies (ICTs), entrepreneurship, innovation, and computational social science. Her research is motivated by one question: How can organizations more effectively catalyze organizational and social change? She uses multiple methods, such as interviews, content analysis, social network analysis, and statistical modeling, to examine the dynamic processes of organizing for public value creation. She has won awards for her research from the Academy of Management, International Communication Association, and National Science Foundation.

Sophia Fu

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University. She does work in the areas of computational social science and network analysis. Her research has a broad focus on the impact of technology on social structures, political and civic engagement, and the media system.

Prior to her appointment at Rutgers, Katherine was a postdoctoral researcher at the Lazer Lab, Northeastern University and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. She holds a doctoral degree in Communication from the University of Southern California.

For more information visit Katya’s website at www.kateto.net or follow her on Twitter at @Ognyanova.

Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

Matthew S. Weber is an Associate 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.

Matthew Weber

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

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.

Dajung Woo

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

Affiliated Faculty

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.

Paul McLean

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

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.

Hana Shepherd

Faculty, NetSCI Lab

Graduate Students

Minkyung Kim

Graduate Student, NetSCI Lab

Melanie Kwestel

Graduate Student, NetSCI Lab

Alumni

Yannick Atouba

Post-Doctoral Research Assistants, NetSCI Lab

Jack Harris

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Young Hoon

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Kautuki Jariwala

Graduate Student, NetSCI Lab

Heewon Kim

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Allie Kosterich

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Teis Kristensen

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Weixu Lu

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Ziad Matni

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Nik Ahmad Rozaidi

Alumni, NetSCI Lab

Wei Shi

Graduate Student, NetSCI Lab

Hyunsook Youn

Graduate Student, NetSCI Lab

Mengxiao Zhu

Alumni, NetSCI Lab