Please join the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems in congratulating Lingfei Wu on his promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure!
Professor Wu joined the Department in August 2019. Since then, he has successfully established a multi-disciplinary research program on the Science of Science, Team Science and Innovation, and Computational Social Science. He seeks to understand how team collaboration drives progress in science and technology through the leveraging of big data, artificial intelligence, and complexity sciences. His work focuses on the dynamics of team collaboration, nature of scientific innovation, and the role of science in society.
One of his recent projects involves measuring innovation. To do so, he tracks the spread of ideas by analyzing millions of research papers and their citation patterns. This work helped establish the Disruption Index, the first validated metric for identifying breakthroughs by detecting when new ideas overtake the old (Nature, 2019; Science, 2026).
In 2023, Professor Wu was recognized with the prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his work on “How Does Core Scientific Knowledge Advance Understanding: Team Innovation at the Foundations of Sciences.” The highly-competitive CAREER grant, awarded to only 500 faculty each year across all disciplines, supports early-career faculty who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic role models and leaders in research and education nationwide.
Most recently, he and his collaborators were awarded an NIH R01 Award for the project “The Anatomy of Scientific Biomedical Open-Source Software – From Code to Communities.” Professor Wu is a co-PI on this collaborative R01 grant to address gaps in understanding biomedical open-source software, which is part of the critical infrastructure for medical and health science research.
Overall, Professor Wu has secured funding from NSF, NIH and RK Mellon Foundation, among others, since joining us! His work has been featured in PNAS, Nature, The Atlantic, Forbes, and the New York Times.
Let’s congratulate Lingfei Wu on this well-deserved promotion!