2. What’s one interesting fact about you that your colleagues probably don’t know?

I love going to heavy metal and hard rock concerts and festivals. Moshing and headbanging is still fun after all these years, though I no longer have the long hair I used to wear. Maybe I’ll bump into you at a Pantera or Disturbed concert ;-)

3. What aspects of network-related research are you most passionate about?

I continue to be interested in my main line of research, which is understanding how positive and negative ties interact within networks to drive attitudes, cognition, and behavior. It’s been wonderful to see the huge growth in research on signed graphs since I was a doctoral student, which is gratifying because I remember being told early on that no one would be interested in a network perspective on conflict. I’m also passionate about understanding how we can intervene to change individuals’ networks, which I see as being a very interesting and hot area of study, particularly in organizational networks.

4. What inspired your research interests in networks, and when did you realize that you want to be a network scholar?

I was a social psychology undergraduate studying the initiation of dating relationships and thinking that all the work I was reading was too individually- or dyadically-oriented -- where was the rest of the network, which was often intervening to set up dates or break up bad relationships? That lack of network awareness in social psychology led me to read Harrison White’s (1961) dissertation paper on positive and negative ties in a company’s top management team, which got me hooked on the topic and eventually led to my own dissertation.

5. Would you like to give any advice to more junior researchers who are studying social networks?

Do a lot of reviewing for journals, both in general management and in specialty networks journals, especially early in your career. You might think that reviewing is a distraction from your own work, but I can’t tell you how many times I was writing a comment to an author in a review and found myself thinking, “you know, that applies to what I was just writing as well -- I need to fix that.” In addition to helping those authors, you’re learning from both their wisdom and their errors. Find a few associate editors at journals on which you’d like to join the editorial board and make yourself available to those editors on a regular basis as an ad hoc reviewer and then ask to join the board if they keep sending you manuscripts.