COM Alumni Lingfei Wu Received NSF CAREER Award
02 Mar 2023 (Thu)
Congratulations to Dr. Lingfei Wu on winning a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award in the U. S.. Lingfei received his PhD in Communication from CityU in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Zhu. Upon graduation, he worked at several leading institutions in the U. S., including University of Chicago, Santa Fe Institute, and Arizona State University, before joining University of Pittsburg as an Assistant Professor of Information Science in 2019. He has published computational social science studies in Nature, PNAS, and other world leading journals.
The highly competitive grant of NFS CAREER Award, awarded to nearly 500 faculty each year across all disciplines, support early-career faculty who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic role models and leaders in research and education nationwide.
This five-year award will support Wu’s investigation of team collaboration mechanisms underlying the production of millions of scholarly and educational documents over the past century. The study will examine how individual scientists can learn, progress, and effectively innovate in teams (see more at
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2239418).
“Science is getting harder and more complicated. And a common belief is that teams are the solutions—the hope is that by putting together a blacksmith, a mason, and a carpenter, we will get a Leonardo da Vinci. But is this true? If teaming more specialists is all it takes to make bigger innovations, why have we seen larger research teams but fewer breakthrough ideas?”
Lingfei suggested that it is time to admit that we still know little of how teams work in science and reflect upon “team science,” the zeitgeist of our time that view collaboration as an inevitable trend, the expectation that scientists in teams will achieve breakthroughs otherwise difficult to attain through individual or additive efforts.
Lingfei will leverage big data, complexity sciences, and artificial intelligence to develop multiple research directions under the umbrella of the Science of Team Science and Innovation. Building upon his previous findings published in Nature, PNAS, and other prestigious journals, he proposes to quantify the evolution of core scientific knowledge as the displacement between highly cited research articles on the same topic; examine the psychological, communication, and financial conditions of individuals scientists in teams that successfully innovated the core knowledge; and finally, investigate the career outcomes of team members who contributed to core knowledge innovation, with a special focus on early-career women and minority scientists.
