ANN ARBOR, Mich. – March 31, 2021 – PRLog — CIMdata, Inc. and Eurostep are pleased to announce that Professor Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University will make a keynote presentation at PLM Road Map & PDT North America Spring 2021. The event will take place virtually over two half days on May 19 & 20. The theme for this year’s event is “Disruption—the PLM Professionals’ Exploration of Emerging Technologies that Will Reshape the PLM Value Equation.”

Cooperation is critical in space, and NASA has identified important traits for successful teamwork in anticipation of an upcoming Mars expedition. To help assemble a team for the three-year mission, NASA is working with researchers to develop a predictive model of group performance, one which anticipates conflicts and communication breakdowns based on personality traits. At PLM conferences, presentations often mention the dependency on people, processes, and technology for success but mainly focus on the technology. The introduction of disruptive technologies puts even more pressure on the people aspect.

In his keynote presentation, Designing and Keeping Great Teams. Lessons from Preparing for Mars. What Can PLM Professionals Learn from This? Professor Contractor will share research findings on assembling a mission-critical team for space travel that might well apply to setting up a mission-critical team for a multi-year PLM implementation.

PLM Road Map & PDT Spring is a highly relevant event for PLM industry leaders and PLM practitioners globally, providing independent education where ideas, trends, experiences, and relationships critical to the industry germinate and take root.

For more detail on the agenda, please visit https://www.cimdata.com/en/education/plm-conferences/plmrm-pdt-spring-2021.

About Professor Noshir Contractor

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is also the President-Elect-Select of the International Communication Association.

Professor Contractor has been at the forefront of three emerging interdisciplinary areas: network science, computational social science, and web science. He is investigating how social and knowledge networks form – and perform – in various contexts, including business, scientific communities, healthcare, and space travel. His research has been funded continuously for 25 years by the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, NASA, DARPA, Army Research Laboratory, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

His book, Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Peter Monge), received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery. He also received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association and the Lifetime Service Award from the Organizational Communication & Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management. In 2018, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.