I am an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’m also the program director of the Translational Team Science Initiative at Illinois, whose mission is to expand our empirical foundations to understand how science teams function and to identify which institutional resources and team practices truly strengthen collaboration and research outcomes.
My research explores the challenges individuals and teams face as they seek to collaborate across knowledge boundaries, and the strategies that interdisciplinary science teams can enact to productively manage their differences. I conceptualize teams as embedded within broader organizational contexts that can either help or hinder this collaborative labor. In modern organizations, it’s impossible to fully understand these processes without also recognizing the role that technologies play in the production and communication of meaning. Some of my work explores how individuals in organizations design and use technologies to collaborate across knowledge boundaries. I draw on the theoretical traditions of symbolic interactionism, social constructivism, and practice perspectives from communication studies, organization studies, science of team science, and science and technology studies.
Drawing primarily on fieldwork, my research aims to capture collaborative work as it occurs within and across organizations. I rely heavily on ethnographic and social network analytic methods to uncover themes in his data.
I have two primary areas of current research:
- Examining policy implications to enable diverse scientific collaborations: I am currently involved in a multiyear research project examining whether and how access to institutionalized policies and resources supporting interdisciplinarity enable the effective production of diverse scientific teams. Our current efforts are based at a field site we call the “Nature Institute,” a multidisciplinary research center whose primary mission is to provide natural scientists with the resources necessary to facilitate cross-disciplinary research addressing important grand-challenge research issues. My team is using a mixture of bibliometrics, sociometrics, and qualitative field methods to examine how joining an organization like the NI has affected researchers’ careers.
In prior work, my research team performed mixed-method study of interdisciplinary relationships at a the “Computational Research Center” (CRC) a medium sized research center with an emphasis on the application of computational methods. As an organization with a 30-year tradition of successful interdisciplinary projects, the CRC was an ideal context to explore the strategies individuals deploy to construct and maintain cross-boundary relationships. Using a mix of interviews, observations, and a social network survey, my team and I were curious to understand the conditions under which social structure serves to support or hinder attempts to collaborate.
- Building interventions to foster innovation on diverse scientific teams: For the past several years, I have been the lead investigator on a series of grants applying findings from research on innovation, interdisciplinary teams, and group dynamics to recruit and support diverse teams of scientists interested in addressing societal grand challenges. In addition to their unique opportunity to apply findings from our field to important issues, these projects have offered our team unique access to understanding the challenges scientists face when seeking to collaborate across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. My research team is particularly interested in using data from this project to understand how to build effective policies and procedures to support diversity and inclusion through science policy. Some descriptions of our work are available here, here, and here.
I earned my Ph.D. in 2014 from the Media, Technology and Society program in Northwestern University’s School of Communication. While I was a grad student at Northwestern, I was lucky to be a member of a thriving research community. I worked on projects with several faculty including my advisor, Paul Leonardi, as well as Noshir Contractor, Pablo Boczkowski, and William Ocasio. I also collaborated closely with other graduate students including Jeffrey Treem (now a professor at Northwestern University) and Alan Clark.
Prior to Northwestern I spent two years studying car culture as an associate researcher at General Motors Research & Design. I also have a B.S. in Cognitive Science from University of California, San Diego where I was first fascinated by concepts of distributed cognition, user centered design, and collaboration by scholars like David Kirsh, Jim Hollan, and Edwin Hutchins.