About

Brian Uzzi is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He also serves as Co-Director of the Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and The Ryan Institute on Complexity (RIC), and holds positions as a professor in sociology and the McCormick School of Engineering. His work focuses on the link between social networks and human achievement, as well as the role of artificial intelligence in mind and machine partnerships. Uzzi has been recognized with over 30 teaching and research prizes worldwide across sociology, management, ecology, and computer science, and is a Network Science Society Fellow, a recipient of the Euler Award, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His academic career includes faculty positions at Harvard, INSEAD, the University of Chicago, and Berkeley. His research has been widely cited and funded by organizations such as DARPA and NSF, and he also consults for companies and governments globally. Uzzi holds a PhD in sociology from Stony Brook University and has a diverse background that includes work as a carpenter and musician.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Medicine
• World Wide Web
• Gender studies
• Social psychology
• Medical education
• Management
• Demography

Selected publications

• The institutional dynamics of inequality for women inventors who break with conventional thinking

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2026-04-17

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Though women comprise a growing share of the scientific workforce, the gender innovation gap in patenting between men and women inventors persists, potentially limiting innovation output and equity. We study millions of scientific and technological innovations and find that the innovation gap faced by women is not universal. No gap exists for highly conventional innovations, which combine ideas in familiar ways. Rather, it exists when women inventors attempt to patent unconventional inventions, which combine ideas in surprising ways and drive scientific advancements. Our data suggest that rather than deliberate bias, a confluence of institutional practices lower women inventor's chances of patenting unconventional innovations. We find that women examiners relative to men have less of the on-the-job experience needed to appraise unconventional innovations. Additionally, women examiners are overassigned to women applicants, reducing their odds of successfully patenting unconventional inventions. Lastly, traditional explanations weakly account for this innovation gap because men examiners grant comparably more unconventional innovations to women inventors than do women examiners. These institutional barriers reveal new factors that slow innovation, but at the same time can be more directly addressed than deeply rooted gender norms.

  PublisherDOI

• AI can spark creativity — if we ask it how, not what, to think

  Nature · 2026-01-13

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A large-scale comparison of divergent creativity in humans and large language models

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-12-23 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Analysis of Collaboration in CS Prizewinning with a Nobel-Turing Comparison

  ArXiv.org · 2025-12-30

  articleOpen access

  In the scientific community, prizes play a pivotal role in shaping research trajectories by conferring credibility and offering financial incentives to researchers. Yet, we know little about the relationship between academic collaborations and prizewinning. By analyzing over 100 scientific prizes and the collaboration behaviors of over 5,000 prizewinners in CS, we find that prizewinners collaborate earlier and more frequently with other prizewinners than researchers who have not yet received similar recognition. Moreover, CS researchers across age groups collaborate more with prizewinners after winning their first prize, and collaborating with prizewinners after their first win increases the likelihood of the collaborator winning an award. We find that recipients of general CS prizes collaborate more than recipients of more specialized prizes, who collaborate less frequently. With Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) and regression, we find an increase in prizewinning odds with strength of prizewinner collaboration. We examine the context of recent Nobel Prizes going to CS researchers by showing how an increasing share of Physics awards go to Physics-CS collaborations, and contrast Nobel-Turing winning author's trajectories. Our findings shed light on the relationship between prizewinning and collaboration.

  PublisherOA PDF

• A High-Scale Assessment of Social Media and Mainstream Media in Scientific Communication

  ArXiv.org · 2025-11-11

  preprintOpen access

  Communication of scientific knowledge beyond the walls of science is key to science's societal impact. Media channels play sizable roles in disseminating new scientific ideas about human health, economic welfare, and government policy as well as responses to emergent challenges such as climate change. Indeed, effectively communicating science to the public helps inform society's decisions on scientific and technological policies, the value of science, and investment in research. At the same time, the rise of social media has greatly changed communication systems, which may substantially affect the public's interface with science. Examining 20.9 million scientific publications, we compare research coverage in social media and mainstream media in a broad corpus of scientific work. We find substantial shifts in the scale, impact, and heterogeneity of scientific coverage. First, social media significantly alters what science is, and is not, covered. Whereas mainstream media accentuates eminence in the coverage of science and focuses on specific fields, social media more evenly sample research according to field, institutional rank, journal, and demography, increasing the scale of scientific ideas covered relative to mainstream outlets more than eightfold. Second, despite concerns about the quality of science represented in social media, we find that social media typically covers scientific works that are impactful and novel within science. Third, scientists on social media, as experts in their domains, tend to surface high-impact research in their own fields while sampling widely across research institutions. Contrary to prevalent observations about social media, these findings reveal that social media expands and diversifies science reporting by highlighting high-impact research and bringing a broader array of scholars, institutions and scientific concepts into public view.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The distinctive innovation patterns and network embeddedness of scientific prizewinners

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-09-29

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet in practice, prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, and even as prizes proliferate, knowledge of how prizewinning relates to innovation is nascent. Analyzing 2,460 worldwide prizes, we compared the innovativeness of over 23,000 prizewinners and matched nonprizewinners whose performance records were statistically equivalent up to the prize year. First, we find that prizewinners are more innovative. Their research is more likely to combine existing ideas in new ways, integrate a topic's historical and contemporary thinking, and incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives. Second, although prizewinners and matched nonprizewinners have statistically equivalent impact and productivity records up to the prize year, at about five years before the prize, prizewinners' papers become more innovative than their matched peers. This difference widens each year, peaks during the prize year, and then persists for the remainder of their careers. Third, network embeddedness predicts unusual innovativeness. Compared to nonprizewinners, prizewinners' collaborations are shorter in duration, encompass wider exposure to unfamiliar topics, and involve coauthors whose networks minimally overlap with each other. The findings' implications for innovation in science and the efficacy of reward systems and innovation in science are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Analysis of Collaboration in CS Prizewinning with a Nobel-Turing Comparison

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025-12-30

  preprintOpen access

  In the scientific community, prizes play a pivotal role in shaping research trajectories by conferring credibility and offering financial incentives to researchers. Yet, we know little about the relationship between academic collaborations and prizewinning. By analyzing over 100 scientific prizes and the collaboration behaviors of over 5,000 prizewinners in CS, we find that prizewinners collaborate earlier and more frequently with other prizewinners than researchers who have not yet received similar recognition. Moreover, CS researchers across age groups collaborate more with prizewinners after winning their first prize, and collaborating with prizewinners after their first win increases the likelihood of the collaborator winning an award. We find that recipients of general CS prizes collaborate more than recipients of more specialized prizes, who collaborate less frequently. With Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) and regression, we find an increase in prizewinning odds with strength of prizewinner collaboration. We examine the context of recent Nobel Prizes going to CS researchers by showing how an increasing share of Physics awards go to Physics-CS collaborations, and contrast Nobel-Turing winning author's trajectories. Our findings shed light on the relationship between prizewinning and collaboration.

  PublisherDOI

• Peer Review and the Diffusion of Ideas

  ArXiv.org · 2025-07-16

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  This study examines a fundamental yet overlooked function of peer review: its role in exposing reviewers to new and unexpected ideas. Leveraging a natural experiment involving over half a million peer review invitations covering both accepted and rejected manuscripts, and integrating high-scale bibliographic and editorial records for 37,279 submitting authors, we find that exposure to a manuscript's core ideas significantly influences the future referencing behavior and knowledge of reviewer invitees who decline the review invite. Specifically, declining reviewer invitees who could view concise summaries of the manuscript's core ideas not only increase their citations to the manuscript itself but also demonstrate expanded breadth, depth, diversity, and prominence of citations to the submitting author's broader body of work. Overall, these results suggest peer review substantially influences the spread of scientific knowledge. Ironically, while the massive scale of peer review, entailing millions of reviews annually, often drives policy debates about its costs and burdens, our findings demonstrate that precisely because of this scale, peer review serves as a powerful yet previously unrecognized engine for idea diffusion, which is central to scientific advances and scholarly communication.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• High-Impact Innovations and Hidden Gender Disparities in Inventor-Evaluator Networks

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-08-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We study of millions of scientific, technological, and artistic innovations and find that the innovation gap faced by women is far from universal. No gap exists for conventional innovations. Rather, the gap is pervasively rooted in innovations that combine ideas in unexpected ways - innovations most critical to scientific breakthroughs. Further, at the USPTO we find that female examiners reject up to 33 percent more unconventional innovations by women inventors than do male examiners, suggesting that gender discrimination weakly explains this innovation gap. Instead, new data indicate that a configuration of institutional practices explains the innovation gap. These practices compromise the expertise women examiners need to accurately assess unconventional innovations and then "over-assign" women examiners to women innovators, undermining women's innovations. These institutional impediments negatively impact innovation rates in science but have the virtue of being more amenable to actionable policy changes than does culturally ingrained gender discrimination.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is Demography Destiny? Exploring the Influence of Gendered Organizational and Occupational Contexts

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  Gender differences in career trajectories and representation in top- tier positions persist today, despite broader progress toward achieving equality in society. A robust body of evidence points to a combination of supply-side (i.e., differences in preferences) and demand-side (i.e., biases and unfair barriers) processes perpetuating gender gaps in career advancement. To develop a comprehensive understanding of these processes, it is crucial to take a multi-level perspective and consider the interplay between men and women and their firms, networks, and occupational contexts. This symposium contributes to this growing area of work by bringing together quantitative and qualitative work that builds and tests theory for how gendered organizational, occupational, and network contexts impact various aspects of men’s and women’s performance, experiences, and choices in the workplace. Protecting the occupation: Incumbent backlash in response to gender diversity in law enforcement Author: Jirs Meuris; U. of Wisconsin-Madison Author: Jennifer M. Merluzzi; George Washington U. Author: Alexis Avery; U. of Wisconsin, Madison Author: Julia Lee Melin; Dartmouth College, Tuck School of Business Exploring positive career implications of feminized behavior for women in male-dominated occupations Author: Tiffany Trzebiatowski; Colorado State U. Author: Teresa Cardador; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Collaboration-association trade-off: Artist network gender composition and creative product novelty Author: Noah Askin; U. of California, Irvine Author: Sharon Koppman; U. of California, Irvine Author: Michael Mauskapf; Columbia Business School Author: Brian Uzzi; Northwestern U. Investments to responsibilities: Unpacking sponsors' gendered reasons for lending social capital Author: Elizabeth Lauren Campbell; Rady School of Management, U. of California San Diego

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Henry Etzkowitz

  38 shared

• Carol Kemelgor

  37 shared

• Benjamin F. Jones

  29 shared

• Ginger Zhe Jin

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  16 shared

• Serguei Saavedra

  15 shared

• Yang Yang

  Nanjing University of Science and Technology

  14 shared

• Daniel M. Romero

  12 shared

• Yifang Ma

  12 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  Stony Brook University

  1994

Awards & honors

• Network Science Society Fellow
• Euler Award
• Lifetime Professor of the Year
• Kellogg-Racanti Executive MBA Program Euler Award
• Professor of the Year (2013, 2014, 2018-2020)