Professor Contractor has been at the forefront of three emerging interdisciplines: network science, computational social science and web science. He is investigating how social and knowledge networks form – and perform – in 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 and the 2021 Fellows Book Award from the International Communication Association (ICA).  He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Network Science Society, and the International Communication Association (ICA).  He also received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Communication Association, the Lifetime Service Award from the Communication, Digital Technology, & Organization Division of the Academy of Management, and the Simmel Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). In 2018 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he received a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.