Speaker:

Brian Uzzi, Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change, Kellogg School of Management

Title:

The Universal Link Between a Mentor’s Tacit Knowledge and a Protégé’s Scientific Success

Abstract:

Modern science is arguably in the epoch of collaboration. Mentorship is often a scientist's first, most formative, longest lasting, and in some cases compulsory collaborative relationship, yet a dearth of large scale quantitative studies of scientific mentorship leave central questions unanswered. We collected 100 years of intricate data on the publication records, genealogical networks, and social networks of 50,000 mentors and protégés in diverse fields worldwide to test if mentorship adds value to protégés’ existing talents and how it is imparted from mentors to protégés. Using a quasi-experimental design, we report three novel findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success on a wide range of scientific performance outcomes. Worldwide and universally across diverse disciplines and time, protégés of mentors who have scientific tacit knowledge about how to conduct and publish acclaimed research are two and a half times likelier to be science prizewinners, four times likelier to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and two times likelier to write high impact articles than control group protégés. Second, the positive impact of mentorship increases with the talent of the protégé at an increasing rate. Third, we demonstrate that mentorship neglect can undercut the imparting of critical tacit knowledge from mentors to protégés, which in turn is associated with a delay in the time even the most highly talented protégés take to make their leading scientific discoveries.

Speaker Bio:

Brian Uzzi is a globally recognized scientist, teacher, consultant and speaker on leadership, social networks, data science, AI and machine learning. He is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He also co-directs NICO, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, is the faculty director of the Kellogg Architectures of Collaboration Initiative (KACI), and holds professorships in Sociology at the Weinberg College of Arts of Sciences and in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering. He has lectured and advised companies and governments around the world and has been on or visited the faculties of INSEAD, University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard University. He has been awarded 13 teaching prizes and 12 scientific research prizes worldwide.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between.

Live Stream:

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