Exeter Centre for Social Networks

Our people

ECSN is a diverse community of social network academics and practitioners.

Our team is led by Professor Andrew Parker, a distinguished academic whose recent research has focused on how managers and employees can utilise their social networks. Professor Parker’s work has been published in numerous leading journals and he is the author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks.

Deputy Director of the Centre is Dr Cecile Emery, senior lecturer in leadership, whose research has examined advanced social network techniques and, specifically, the relationship that leaders develop with their followers.

They are supported by a team of over 10 senior faculty members and four PhD students from the University of Exeter Business School.

Sam Chen

MRes student

Yijin (Sam) Chen is pursuing his MRes in Management at the Business School. He earned his MSc in Social Research from the University of Edinburgh, with an award of distinction and best overall performance. Sam is currently working on a research project examining the relationship between actors' network positions and promotion using an interpretable machine learning framework.

Zexi LI

PhD student

Zexi (Flavia) Li is a MPhil/Doctoral student in Organisation Studies/Management at the University of Exeter Business School. Her research focuses on studying formal and informal interpersonal workplace relationships from psychology perspective. Flavia’s current research uses attachment theory and social network methods to study the antecedents, characteristics, and outcomes of friendship network and advice network in the workplace.

Aaron Page

PhD student

Aaron Page is a doctoral student at the University of Exeter Business School. His research interests lie in the fields of gender and leadership, with a specific focus on gender and corporate boards. Aaron’s research highlights the antecedents and outcomes of gender diversity on corporate boards, the theories and methods employed within his work derive from the academic disciplines of social network analysis; social psychology; and institutional theory.

Laura Roldan Gomez

PhD student

Laura is a PhD student in Advanced Quantitative Methods at the University of Exeter Politics Department. Her research centres on studying the nexus between the armed conflict and the deforestation in Colombia. For her research, Laura uses a social-ecological networks approach.