Social networking professional with five years of increasing experience in analyzing inter- and intra-organizational networks. Goal: to leverage interpersonal relationships in corporate, academic, and government projects to increase productivity and knowledge sharing. Current interest in Web 2.0 projects. Born in Germany and educated in Germany, Switzerland, and US; fluent in English and German and easily adaptable to global business situations.


I am currently a postdoctoral fellow and the research director of the Program on Networked Governance, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

I earned my PhD (Dr. oec., 2005) in Business Economics at the University of St. Gallen, Institute of Management, Switzerland. While conducting the doctoral coursework at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, I was the project manager of StrategyLab, an Internet portal on Strategic Management, which addresses both business and research issues, and provides a lot of information and teaching material.

Before my time in St. Gallen, I studied Business Economics at the University of Kassel, Germany, and University of Leiden, Netherlands, and graduated in 1999 (MBA).

My research focuses on social networks as well as the diffusion and adoption of Internet technologies. My empirical research includes extensive social network analyses of faculty members in Business Schools, among DNA forensic scientists, across Members of Congress’ offices and the networking behavior of State Health Officers as well as academics in conference settings.

I am currently looking into characteristics of knowledge hubs within professional communities, and am especially interested in understanding why people act altruistically when it comes to knowledge sharing activities. Moreover, together with different co-authors, I conduct research to understand why, when and how people create, maintain or break their online social ties and how online ties and therefore online social networking platforms can be made sustainable over time. Together with my co-authors, I wrote a couple of papers on Web 2.0 applications in the corporate context and am keen to start projects in this area to investigate closer why people create, maintain, break and re-connect online ties in social networking platforms.

To represent my research field a little better, I maintain a website on Social Network Analysis research on a subpage of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University.

I am currently on the job market for assistant professor positions and am looking into job postings from Business Schools, Management Departments and Information Management departments. I uploaded all information about myself (full CV, teaching experience, research experience, publication lists, etc.) on my KSG page. Events and news are on my wordpress BLOG on social network research.