Professor Owen-Smith conducts research on the collective dynamics of large scale networks and their implications for scientific and technological innovation and surgical care. He is the executive director of the Institution for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS, http://iris.isr.umich.edu).  IRIS is a national consortium of research universities who share data and support infrastructure designed to support research to understand, explain, and eventually improve the public value of academic research and research training.

One year snapshot of the collaboration network of a single large research university campus. Nodes are individuals employed on sponsored project grants, ties represent copayment on the same grant account in the same year. Ties are valued to reflect the number of grants in common. Node size is proportional to a simple measure of betweenness centrality and node color represents the results of a simple (walktrip) community finding algorithm. The image was created in Gephi.