Dashun Wang

Last updated
Dashun Wang
Alma mater Northeastern University
Fudan University
Awards Erdős–Rényi Prize in Network Science [1]
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics, Science of Science, Computational Social Science, Network Science, Big Data, Complex Systems
Institutions Northwestern University
Pennsylvania State University
Northeastern University
Doctoral advisor Albert-László Barabási
Website https://www.dashunwang.com/

Dashun Wang is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He serves as the founding director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI) [2] and a founding co-director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity. [3] [4] [5] Wang is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award (2016) [6] and was named one of Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors (2019). [7]

Contents

Career

In 2007, Wang earned an undergraduate degree in Physics from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He then earned both a M.Sc and a PhD in physics from Northeastern University. From January 2015 to July 2016, he was an assistant professor of College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is currently a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering, at Northwestern University. [8]

Research

Wang studies the science of science, an interdisciplinary field that examines scientific careers and the scientific process. His work on the career paths of individual innovators identifies patterns in scientific careers, including the random impact rule and the hot streak phenomenon. [9] [10]

His study of the organization of innovative activity shows that bigger teams generally advance and improve established concepts, and smaller teams are more often responsible for breakthroughs in science and technology. [11] [12]

Wang’s research on failure has led to empirical evidence of the importance of responses to failure at the beginning of careers [13] [14] and a quantitative framework for learning from failure. He has also studied collective dynamics in social networks, human mobility, and long-term scientific impact.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wang analyzed global policy responses to the pandemic. [15]

Awards and honors

In 2014, Wang received the Invention Achievement Award from IBM Research. In 2016, Wang was a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award. [6] In 2018, he received an award from the Minerva Research Initiative, a research program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. [16] [2] In 2019, his paper about the impact of the size of scientific teams was one of Altmetric’s Top 100 most discussed papers across all sciences, [17] and he was named one of Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors. [7] In 2021, he was awarded the Erdős–Rényi Prize. [18]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kellogg School of Management</span> Business school of Northwestern University

The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University is the graduate business school of Northwestern University, a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1908 as the School of Commerce, Kellogg has the second-largest endowment of any business school.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Endre Szemerédi</span> Hungarian-American mathematician

Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He also holds a professor emeritus status at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert-László Barabási</span> Hungarian-American physicist (born 1967)

Albert-László Barabási is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist, best known for his discoveries in network science and network medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">László Lovász</span> Hungarian mathematician

László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Complex network</span> Network with non-trivial topological features

In the context of network theory, a complex network is a graph (network) with non-trivial topological features—features that do not occur in simple networks such as lattices or random graphs but often occur in networks representing real systems. The study of complex networks is a young and active area of scientific research inspired largely by empirical findings of real-world networks such as computer networks, biological networks, technological networks, brain networks, climate networks and social networks.

A person's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring academic papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the person is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer a person is to Erdős and Bacon, which reflects a small world phenomenon in academia and entertainment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Watts–Strogatz model</span> Method of generating random small-world graphs

The Watts–Strogatz model is a random graph generation model that produces graphs with small-world properties, including short average path lengths and high clustering. It was proposed by Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz in their article published in 1998 in the Nature scientific journal. The model also became known as the (Watts) beta model after Watts used to formulate it in his popular science book Six Degrees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adilson E. Motter</span> American scientist (born 1974)

Adilson E. Motter is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, where he has helped develop the concept of synthetic rescue in network biology as well as methods to control the nonlinear dynamics of complex networks. In joint work with Takashi Nishikawa, he discovered the phenomenon of converse symmetry breaking. Motter's research is focused on complex systems and nonlinear phenomena, primarily involving complex networks, systems biology, chaos and statistical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altmetrics</span> Alternative metrics for analyzing scholarship

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.

Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.

The Erdős–Rényi Prize of the Network Science Society is named after Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi. This international prize is awarded annually in a special ceremony at the International Conference on Network Science to a selected young scientist for their research achievements in the area of network science, broadly construed. While the achievements can be both theoretical and experimental, the prize is aimed at emphasizing outstanding contributions relevant to the interdisciplinary progress of network science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altmetric</span>

Altmetric, or altmetric.com, is a data science company that tracks where published research is mentioned online, and provides tools and services to institutions, publishers, researchers, funders and other organisations to monitor this activity, commonly referred to as altmetrics. Altmetric was recognized by European Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn in 2014 as a company challenging the traditional reputation systems.

The International School and Conference on Network Science, also called NetSci, is an annual conference focusing on networks. It is organized yearly since 2006 by the Network Science Society. Physicists are especially prominently represented among the participants, though people from other backgrounds attend as well. The study of networks expanded at the end of the twentieth century, with increasing citation of some seminal papers.

Metascience is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science". In the words of John Ioannidis, "Science is the best thing that has happened to human beings ... but we can do it better."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation dynamics</span> Number of references received by a scientific work over time

Citation dynamics describes the number of references received by the article or other scientific work over time. The citation dynamics is usually described by the bang, that take place two–three years after the work has been published, and the burst size spans several orders of magnitude. The presence of bursts is not consistent with other models based on preferential attachment. Those models are able to account for the skewed citation distribution but their reference accumulation is gradual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mauro Martino</span> Italian artist, designer and researcher

Mauro Martino is an Italian artist, designer and researcher. He is the founder and director of the Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab at IBM Research, and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University.

Vittoria Colizza is an Italian scientist, research director at INSERM and a specialist in mathematical modeling of infectious disease and computational epidemiology. In particular, she has carried out research on the modeling of seasonal and pandemic flu, Ebola and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Roberta Sinatra is an Italian scientist and associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is known for her work in network science and conducts research on quantifying success in science.

Brian Uzzi is an American sociologist and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is known for his work on problems in the fields of sociology, network science, the science of science, and complex systems. He is the co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), is a professor of sociology, and a professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering. Since 2019, Uzzi has written a column for Forbes on Leadership and artificial intelligence.

References

  1. ↑ "Erdős–Rényi prize". Network Science Society. Retrieved 15 September 2021.
  2. 1 2 Park, Andrea (2019-09-25). "New Northwestern center will study the science of scientific innovation". Becker's Hospital Review . Retrieved 2024-03-16.
  3. ↑ FORE, PRESTON (September 11, 2023). "Northwestern's Kellogg school is establishing a new $25 million institute for studying complexity science. Here's what you need to know". Fortune Education. Retrieved 2024-02-29.
  4. ↑ Bleizeffer, Kristy (September 6, 2023). “$25 Million Gift Funds Kellogg’s First-Of-Its-Kind Research Institute For Complex Problems.” Poets & Quants. Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  5. ↑ Channick, Robert (2023-09-06). "Funded by the same $480 million gift as stadium proposal, Ryan Institute launches at Northwestern". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2024-05-26.
  6. 1 2 "AFOSR awards grants to 56 scientists and engineers through Young Investigator Research Pro". Air Force Materiel Command. 14 January 2016. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
  7. 1 2 Allen, Nathan (2019-04-23). "Poets&Quants | P&Q's 2019 Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors". Poets&Quants. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
  8. ↑ "Dashun Wang". Dashun Wang. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
  9. ↑ Thompson, Derek (2021-11-01). "Hot Streaks in Your Career Don't Happen by Accident". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  10. ↑ Herrera, Tim (2018-10-08). "Feel Like You Haven't Hit Your Peak Yet? It's Never Too Late". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  11. ↑ Yong, Ed (2019-02-13). "Small Teams of Scientists Have Fresher Ideas". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  12. ↑ Carey, Benedict (2019-02-13). "Can Big Science Be Too Big?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  13. ↑ "In Science, Grit Counts As Well As Talent". The Economist. 2019-05-09. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  14. ↑ Herrera, Tim (2019-10-27). "How Early-Career Setbacks Can Set You Up for Success". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  15. ↑ Bak-Coleman, Joseph; Bergstrom, Carl T. (2022-03-01). "A High Speed Scientific Hive Mind Emerged from the Covid Pandemic". Scientific American. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  16. ↑ "Dynamics, Predictability, and Uncertainty of Scientific Discovery and Advance > Minerva Research Initiative > Awarded Projects". minerva.defense.gov. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
  17. ↑ "The Altmetric Top 100 – 2019". Altmetric. Retrieved 2024-05-26.
  18. ↑ "Erdős–Rényi prize". Network Science Society. Retrieved 15 September 2021.
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