I am a Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. At Kellogg, I am the Founding Co-Director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity and the Founder and Director of the Center for Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI). I am also a core faculty at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).

Prior to joining Northwestern, I was an Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University and before that, a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. I received my Ph.D. in physics in 2013 from Northeastern University, where I was a member of the Center for Complex Network Research. From 2009 to 2013, I also held an affiliation with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University as a Research Associate. I received my B.S. degree in physics from Fudan University in 2007. I am a recipient of multiple awards for my research and teaching, including the AFOSR Young Investigator award, Poets & Quants Best 40 Under 40 Professors, Junior Scientific Award from the Complex Systems Society, the Erdos-Renyi Prize, Thinkers50 Radar List, and more.

At CSSI, I lead a group of highly interdisciplinary researchers who are all extremely passionate about data. Our research takes a multidisciplinary approach—combining statistical physics, computer science, and computational social science—to exploit the opportunities and promises offered by Big Data. Through the lens of new and increasingly available large-scale datasets, we hope to use and develop tools of network science to help improve the way in which we understand the interconnectedness of the social, technical, and business world around us. Our research has been published in such general audience journals as Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Physics, Nature Reviews Physics, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, and more. It has been featured in virtually all major global media outlets, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Today Show, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, World Economic Forum, Forbes, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among others.

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