Dr Jukka-Pekka Onnela awarded Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Grant

CABDyN member, Dr Jukka-Pekka Onnela, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to spend 12 months working with Professor David Lazer in Harvard University starting in August 2008. In the Fulbright-Technology Industries of Finland Grant Programme two graduate students and one post-doctoral researcher were selected.

The proposed project plan, entitled “Statistical mechanics of group formation and performance”, explores what factors contribute to group formation, whether spontaneous or externally driven, and the resulting group diversity and performance.

‘Friends can form a group effortlessly but it may lack in the diversity needed for high group performance, whereas a group formed to maximize diversity and performance may turn out to be too unstable over time.’

The proposed project aims to understand what factors contribute to group formation, whether spontaneous or externally driven, and the resulting performance of the group. What type of groups are capable of self-organisation? What type of groups perform well? Is there a preferred group size? Are high performing groups, due to the diversity of the involved actors, necessarily unstable over time?

Jukka-Pekka is a Junior Research Fellow in Complex Systems and Networks Research at Wolfson College, an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School, and a member of the Complex Systems Group at the Clarendon Laboratory (Department of Physics).

Jukka-Pekka is co-convenor of the CABDyN Seminar Series at the Saïd Business School and co-ordinator of the Complex Networks Journal Club in the Physics Department in Oxford.