Conferences each year cost billions of dollars in the US alone, not to mention the environmental and opportunity costs incurred. Conferences have several purposes: to share information, network, and form new scientific collaborations. In a series of studies, we investigate how scientists form collaborations at virtual and in-person conferences, how these collaborations persist beyond the end of the conference, how to mitigate homophily effects in team formation, and the role of higher-order interactions in team formation. This research was conducted in partnership with the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) that runs the Scialog Conferences which seek to accelerate the work of 21st-century transformational science through research, dialog, and community.
2024: Quantitative comparison of virtual and in-person conferences
Zajdela, E.R.; Huynh, K.; Feig, A.L.; Wiener, R.J. & Abrams, D.M. Face-to-face or face-to-screen? A quantitative comparison of conferences modalities. PNAS Nexus, [accepted]
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a societal shift from in-person to virtual activities, including scientific conferences. As society navigates a “new normal,” the question arises as to the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative modalities. We introduce two new comprehensive datasets enabling direct comparison between virtual and in-person conferences: the first, from a series of nine small conferences, encompasses over 12,000 pairs of potential scientific collaborators across five virtual and four in-person meetings on a range of scientific topics; the expressed goal of these conferences is to create novel collaborations. The second dataset, from a series of three large physics conferences, encompasses $>$250,000 possible pairs of scientific collaborators. Our study provides quantitative insight into benefits and drawbacks of virtual and in-person conferences for team formation, community building, and engagement. We demonstrate the causal role of formal interaction on team formation across both modalities. Our findings show that formal interaction impacted team formation significantly more in virtual settings, while informal interaction played a larger role at in-person conferences as compared to virtual.
2024: Hypergraph methods for predicting scientific team formation
Zajdela, E.R. & Landry, N.W. “Hypergraph Methods for Predicting Team Formation in Science.” In Hypergraph Methods in Intelligence Analysis, edited by Hasenjager, M., Fefferman, N. and Bailey, M. [invited chapter; in prep]
Traditional network methods consider pairwise interactions between nodes. However, many group activities such as scientific collaboration behave differently than the sum of pairwise interactions. In this chapter, we consider what it means to interact in groups over time and use hypergraph methods to assess the predictive value of adding information on higher-order interactions for team formation.
2024: Mitigating homophily effects in team formation at conferences
I am currently serving as a faculty mentor for a group project resulting from the Santa Fe Institute Complexity Global School on “Scialog: An Antidote to Homophily Effects.” The students are Sodiq Mojeed (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ghana), Phanie Negho (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Senegal), and Patience Akatuhwera (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ghana). Their project investigates the role scientific conferences can play in generating diverse, interdisciplinary teams and was selected as one of two winning projects among 18 submissions. As a prize, the group was invited to visit the Santa Fe Institute in September 2024 to continue their research. https://eeb.princeton.edu/news/emma-zajdelas-group-mentees-receive-santa-fe-institute-prize
2022: Modeling the genesis of scientific collaboration
Zajdela, E.R., Huynh, K., Wen, A. T., Feig, A. L., Wiener, R. J., & Abrams, D. M. (2022). Dynamics of social interaction: Modeling the genesis of scientific collaboration. Physical Review Research, 4(4), L042001. https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L042001
This study seeks to answer the question: how effective are conferences at forming new scientific collaborations? To do so, we consider scientific interactions at conferences like molecules in a solution, where the conference itself acts as a catalyst on the formation of collaborations. We developed a nonlinear dynamical model that predicts the probability of a pair of scientists forming a collaboration, given their interaction throughout the duration of the conference. The model, quantifies the time-varying probability that any pair of individuals will initiate a new collaboration. It takes as input the pair’s prior familiarity with one another as well as their pattern of interaction over time, and incorporates the effect of temporally decaying memory. This model accurately reproduces the collaborations formed across all first-year conferences in the four series and outperforms seven other candidate models. We also find evidence that prescribed interaction can lead to novel team formation, with observed collaboration probabilities increased by almost an order of magnitude. These results suggest that encounters among individual researchers at conferences, including encounters engineered by organizers, play an important role in shaping the future of science.
Check out my lightning talk at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems (NICO):
I also gave a talk at the 2021 American Physical Society March meeting.
