Noshir Contractor

Noshir S. Contractor is a professor of Behavioral Science at Northwestern University. He is the director of Sonic Laband is also the director of Web Science Trust. In 2014, Professor Contractor was awarded the prestigious National Communication Association (NCA) Distinguished Scholar Award, honoring "a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication."

Contractor completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) in 1987. Prior to this he received a Master of Arts in Communication also from USC in 1986 and a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1983.

He has published more than 250 research papers in the area of social communication networks. He is well known for the Multi-Theoretical Multi-Level (MTML) Framework with Peter Monge described in detail in Theories of Communication Networks which received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is also one of the principal investigators of the Virtual Worlds Observatory project.