Communities, networks, and scientometrics

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I have two jobs. One  as research faculty in computer science. In the second, I run a research analytics unit for the College of Engineering. The two roles complement each other although time will tell whether either have had broad impact. My work has been supported by awards from the National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, private foundations, and industry. At present, we are supported by an award from the Illinois:Insper Partnership and a grant from the NSF.

My research interests fall in an area bounded by computer science, informatics, scientometrics, the history of science, biomedical research, philosophy, and sociology. The ideas of the Kuhnian research community, center-periphery structure observed by Price and Beaver, and community detection in graphs come together-  in a 'computer-sciency' sense- in my work . I am also interested in epistemic and post-epistemic misconduct- no shortage of case studies there.  Before academia, I worked in industry, and, even before that, in the federal government. My PhD work concerned signaling by the low affinity Fcγ receptor on human platelets and was  performed in the laboratory of Clark Anderson, MD. For a while after, I worked on proximal signaling by antigen receptors then my interests evolved towards research assessment; what is referred to as "meta-research" by some and "science of science" by others. My work does not fit well into either category.

While in biology, I was fortunate to interact with a few outstanding researchers whose influence on me is evident even today. Predictably, I also encountered a few unprincipled types who served to mark the other end of the spectrum. This calibration awakened an interest in the scientific enterprise as a living organism in a symbiotic relationship with society.

My principal collaborator is Tandy Warnow, also at Illinois. In this collaboration, we combine common and complementary interests in theory, methods development, and discovery. I currently work with David Bader from NJIT, Ananth Grama from Purdue, Pablo Robles Granda from Illinois, and Fabio Ayres from Insper, São Paulo. 

More recently, we've begun to work on a new agent-based modeling project (manuscript under review). Making a refined version of the model scalable by at least one order of magnitude falls under the umbrella of the SASCA (Scalable Agent-based Simulator for Citation Analysis) project, builds upon our initial ABM work with Pablo and Ananth, and is now a collaboration with the Grama group. Other active projects concern community detection and the generation of realistic synthetic networks.