Tom A.B. Snijders is Professor of Methodology and Statistics in the Department of Sociology of the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen, and at the University of Oxford he is emeritus fellow of Nuffield College and an associate member of the Department of Statistics. In Groningen, he works in the ICS (Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology), a research school that is a cooperative activity of the Universities of Groningen, Utrecht, and Nijmegen. His main research interests are the following: social network analysis, statistical methods for social networks and in network evolution, multilevel analysis of the textbook on Multilevel Analysis, written by himself and Roel Bosker, social science statistics in general, mathematical sociology, item response theory.

Tom Snijders is associate editor of 'Social Networks', 'Annals of Applied Statistics' and 'Journal of Social Structure', member of the Editorial Board of the journal 'Methodology', member of the European Academy of Sociology, member of the Editorial Board of the 'Statistics in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Series' of Chapman & Hall/CRC, member of Conseil Scientifique, Laboratoire d'Excellence Structuration des Mondes Sociaux, Toulouse, member of Scientific Council, Institute for Advanced Studies, Toulouse. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in the Social Sciences at the University of Stockholm and in 2011 he received a honorary doctorate from the Université Paris-Dauphine.

Peter Bearman is the Director of INCITE, the Cole Professor of Social Science, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program. He was the founding director of ISERP, serving from the Institute's launch in 2000 until 2008. A specialist in network analysis, he co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman investigated the social determinants of the autism epidemic. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including "Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640" (Rutgers, 1993). He is the author of "Doormen" (University of Chicago Press, 2005). He is currently working on models for event sequences, social action, and strategies for qualitative research design; the neural signatures of social relations; and leading the REALM project on fair labor recruitment. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

John Mohr received his PhD from Yale University in 1992. His primary interest is in the empirical study of meaning systems. His focus has been on developing applications of formal methods of relational (network) analysis to the study of discourse in institutional systems. He was originally trained as an organizational sociologist and his early work was concerned with the rise of bureaucratic forms of rationalization in the American social welfare sector (focusing in particular on Progressive Era New York City). More recently he has been active in developing programs for broadening participation in graduate education and his research has shifted to looking at how universities manage the need to pursue racial, ethnic and gender diversity in a post-affirmative action policy climate. He has also been looking at how faculty come to be engaged as change agents on their own campus, how institutional logics operate in student cultures and in the use of text mining tools to analyze rhetorical forms in National Security discourse systems. He has been a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research, the University of Rome as well at the Maison des Sciences de L'Homme in Paris. He has served as chair of the ASA section on the sociology of culture and is incoming chair of the ASA section on theory. He serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Poetics and The American Journal of Cultural Sociology.

John Levi Martin received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was recently a professor, after being a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an assistant professor at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey at New Brunswick. He is now a professor at the University of Chicago at Chicago, where he enjoys teaching classical theory and writing about himself in the third person.

He is best known for his mathematical modeling of the occupational standing of imaginary animals in a single children’s book; he has also written on, and occasionally researched, the formal properties of belief systems and social structures, the constitutional convention of 1787, the rationalization of infantry war, and the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology. He recently finished a book that he started ten years ago, and enjoyed it so much that he is seriously considering reading another one again some time in the future.

Dr Peng Wang is a network methodologist who specializes in the development of statistical models for social network analysis. With a combination of skills in computer science, mathematics and statistics, and social network theory and analysis, Dr Wang has detailed understanding of the advantages of exponential random graph models (ERGMs) for social networks, as well as the challenges that need to be overcome. Collaborating with world renowned leaders in the field of social network analysis, Dr Wang personally contributed to the advance of ERGMs in model specifications, methods for simulations and estimations techniques, computational efficiency and model robustness, and model interpretations and empirical implications. Dr Wang developed the PNet software package for the simulation and estimation of ERGMs. The PNet software serves as an essential part of the SNA research team in Melbourne – MelNet, as well as the general SNA community. Dr Peng Wang’s work contribute to the development of ERGMs and PNet into cases of bipartite, multivariate, longitudinal, nodal attribute based and multilevel network models, with methodological developments on model specifications, conditional estimations on snowball sampled network data, models with missing network data, and models for large networks. He has publications in the fields of Management, Social Ecological Systems, Networks among Adolescents, Disease Transmission and Public Health Issues, Research Collaboration Networks, Political Networks and Interlocking Directorates networks.

Sophie Mützel is Assistant Professor at the University of Lucerne, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research Fields are: economic sociology, sociology of culture, network theory and network analysis, relational sociology, organizational sociology, Innovation, Knowledge, and Culture. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Columbia University, New York, in 2002. She was Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute in Florence, and Assistant Professor at the Research Unit Comparative Structural Analysis of the Institute for Social Sciences, Humboldt-University, Berlin. In 2009-2013 - Senior Research Fellow, research unit "Cultural Sources of Newness", Social Science Research Center Berlin. In 2011-2012 - visiting professorship "Sociological Theories, Sociology of Culture, and Economic Sociology" at the Department of Sociology, University Vienna. And in 2012 she was visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge.

Dr. Iina Hellsten is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. Her research has focused on the politics of metaphors, the dynamics of social avalanches in communication networks, and the development of new methods for the analysis of Web based texts, including social and semantic network analysis. Her research has been published in communication sciences (e.g. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society) and in information sciences (e.g. JASIST, Internet Research). Her current research interests focus on the dynamics of social avalanches.

Johan Koskinen is Lecturer in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. He was awarded his PhD in Statistics from Stockholm University and then has worked at the universities of Stockholm, Melbourne and Oxford. He joined the University of Manchester in 2011. Johan has contributed to the development of a number of statistical models and inference procedures for social networks, in particular exponential random graph models (ERGM) and stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOM). He frequently gives training workshops on statistical methods for social networks to both novices and advanced users of social network analysis and he co-edited a recently published introductory book on ERGM with Dean Lusher and Gary Robins at the Universities of Melbourne and Swinburne.

Camille Roth is Associate Professor at Sciences-Po where he is a member of médialab and affiliated with the department of sociology. He has also been Tenured Researcher at CNRS in computer science since 2008, after being “maître de conférences” at the University of Toulouse-I. He holds a PhD in social science (Ecole Polytechnique, 2005), with a joint background in maths and physics (“ingénieur des Ponts”, 2002) and cognitive science (MSc EHESS, 2002). In the recent years, he founded and directed a team in computational social sciences within Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (an international CNRS/Humboldt Universität research unit), which gathers an interdisciplinary mix of young scholars with varied backgrounds spanning sociology and political science, computer science, cognitive science and linguistics.

His broader research program revolves around socio-semantic networks, dealing with knowledge dynamics and diffusion phenomena, including empirical applications on online and scientific communities. He has been global or local PI for several multi-institution research projects, both at the French and European level, on blog networks, scientific communities, and peer-to-peer platforms, including Webfluence, Algopol and Algodiv (both on informational dynamics of the digital public space) and QLectives (EU IP on quality collectives in socio-technical communities). Author of about 50 peer-reviewed publications, he currently supervises a team of several post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, either in computer science or in sociology.

Nina Kolleck is Professor of Educational Research and Social Systems at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2013-2014 she was Head of a research group entitled “Positioning and Contribution of Foundations” (Positionierung und Beitrag von Stiftungen), Hertie School of Governance and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Before she was Research associate (postdoc) at Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Education and Psychology, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. Nina Kolleck got Prize of best teaching in 2016 and held anonymous expert activities for organizations that provide aid and funding, including the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (within the scope of the P.R.I.M.E. – Postdoctoral Researchers International Mobility Experience – program).

Nina Kolleck is mentor for student aid for a German federal program for highly talented students, she got different scholarships and fellowships from foundations and DAAD. Member of the panel of experts to give expert opinions of master’s degree programs at ASH Berlin (Alice-Salomon Hochschule Berlin). Member of the panel of judges for the competition organized by the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE) and the BMBF to promote local education and competency networks for sustainability. Member of the German Association of Educational Science (DGfE). Member of the German Association of Political Science (DVPW).