UCL School of Management

Soong Moon Kang

Associate Professor
Phone number
(0)20 7679 7842
(internal 37842)
Office location
Engineering Front Building
Rm 4.10

Biography

Dr. Kang is an Associate Professor at UCL School of Management where he joined in 2006.  Prior to his academic career, he had an extensive industry experience in Europe, Asia and the U.S.A. He worked as a manager for market analysis and business strategy for Snecma in Paris, and as a consultant in corporate strategy for LG in Seoul. In Silicon Valley, he co-founded an Internet company, and he was a consultant and advisor to many start-up companies, venture capitalists, and large corporations, including Daimler.

He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering, a M.A. in Sociology and a M.S. in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University, and a degree of Diplom-Ingenieur in Mechanical Engineering from Technische Universität Berlin.

He is a native of Korea, a citizen of Brazil, U.S.A. and U.K., and speaks English, French, German, Korean and Portuguese fluently.

Research

Dr. Kang’s research interests include organization theory, business strategy, technology management and innovation, entrepreneurship, social psychology, computational social science, social network analysis and complex systems. His research has appeared in leading international academic publications including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Organization Science and Social Networks as well as in main popular press such as the Economist, BBC, Spiegel and American Scientist.

Research projects

Status in complex organizations

How people use social references to evaluate an actor’s reputation and performance in complex organizations and communities.

Topology and evolution of networks

How to capture the topological characteristics of networks and their evolution.
Selected publications
Silva, R., Kang, S. M., & Airoldi, E. M. (2015). Predicting traffic volumes and estimating the effects of shocks in massive transportation systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112 (18), 5643-5648. doi:10.1073/pnas.1412908112 [link]
van de Rijt, A., Kang, S. M., Restivo, M., & Patil, A. (2014). Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics. PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 111 (19), 6934-6939. doi:10.1073/pnas.1316836111 [link]
Roth, C., Kang, S. M., Batty, M., & Barthelemy, M. (2012). A long-time limit for world subway networks. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 9 (75), 2540-2550. doi:10.1098/​rsif.2012.0259 [link]
Bianchi, A. J., Kang, S. M., & Stewart, D. (2012). The Organizational Selection of Status Characteristics: Status Evaluations in an Open Source Community. ORGANIZATION SCIENCE, 23 (2), 341-354. doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0580 [link]
Roth, C., Kang, S. M., Batty, M., & Barthelemy, M. (2011). Structure of Urban Movements: Polycentric Activity and Entangled Hierarchical Flows. PLOS ONE, 6 (1), ARTN e15923. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015923 [link]
Kang, S. M. (2007). Equicentrality and network centralization: A micro–macro linkage. Social Networks, 29 (4), 585-601. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2007.07.004 [link]

Link to the publication’s UCL Discovery page