Brian Uzzi

Career

Uzzi received his BA from Hofstra University, a MS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD in sociology from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1994. Mark Granovetter, Michael Schwartz, and Frank Romo were his PhD advisors.

Uzzi joined the Kellogg School of Management in 1993. In 2008, he became the co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), an interdisciplinary research institute whose mission is to serve as a hub for research on complexity and data science that transcends the boundaries of established disciplines. Over his career, he has also been on or visited the faculties of INSEAD, University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the University of California Berkeley. Before entering academia, Uzzi worked as a musician in the New York City area where he grew up and his grandparents settled after immigrating from Italy to the US.

Research

Uzzi is known for his work on social embeddedness, the science of science, and inequality. In the 1990s, he published two empirical papers focusing on the concept of embeddedness. His 1996 paper in the American Sociological Review examines how socially embedded networks of economic relationships impact the economic performance of organizations. His 1997 article in Administrative Science Quarterly pinpoints the paradox of embeddedness in interfirm networks. These two articles have been cited over 21,000 times. His research in this area also addresses diverse problems including competition and cooperation in ecological networks (Nature 2009, 2011), human creativity (AJS 2005), network collapse (PNAS 2008), network dysfunctions under stress (WWW 2016), communication and influence networks (PNAS 2011; Nature Communications 2019), and the causes of women's success in achieving positions of executive leadership (PNAS 2019).

Uzzi has contributed to the Science of Science field with a focus on understanding how scientific structures and practices shape innovation, science, and scientists' careers. In a series of papers, he and colleagues investigated how the mechanisms by which teams self-assemble determine their performance and the topography of the larger network within which these teams are embedded (Science 2005), team science and innovation (Science 2007), multi-university collaborations and stratification in science (Science 2008), and how past scientific knowledge is effectively recombined to create innovative ideas (Science 2013). This work is summarized in part in his TedX talk (2012), "Teaming Up to Drive Scientific Discovery", a 2015 National Research Council book Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science, and a 2018 review article (Science 2018).

Uzzi and his collaborators have also examined gender inequality in the workplace. His book, Athena Unbound (Cambridge 2000) and a 1994 Science article studied the link between women scientists' careers, the leaky pipeline, and critical mass dynamics. A 2019 Nature paper looked at gender disparities in scientific prizes, examining biomedical awards over five decades. This was followed by a paper examining the differences in NIH grants awarded to first-time male and female principal investigators (JAMA, 2019), and a 2022 PNAS paper found that gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas than all-men or all-women teams. Related publications have examined mentorship, retractions, replication failure, knowledge hotspots, and AI-human partnerships.