Dr. Gabriella Paar-Jakli, Assistant Professor, has been awarded the Collaborative Research Incentive Award for her research on Transatlantic Science and Technology Networks (with Ruoming Jin, Department of Computer Science).
As science, technology, and innovation play a fundamental role in economic growth and human development, they become increasingly critical to resolving global issues. As a result, science and technology policy becomes an integral element of the foreign policy process. This project aims to provide new insights into transatlantic relations in science and technology policy. This project aims to provide empirical evidence, hence contribute to the understanding of the complex nature of transatlantic communication and cooperation from a network perspective by connecting and synthesizing ideas developed within the various theories and disciplines. Thereby this project can contribute to filling in a still existing gap between the network perspective and the study of international relations.
This research also aims to find innovative solutions to strengthening the transatlantic partnership through an examination of virtual networking practices of transatlantic organizations, using state of the art techniques. To our knowledge, no research to date has used social network analytical tools and visualization techniques to investigate transatlantic cooperation. This research is guided by the premise that networks can be regarded as new mechanisms of governance and that we can benefit from these networks’ ability to systemize knowledge from a wide variety of sources and disseminate it (Stone, 2005).