Russell Funk

Russell Funk is an assistant professor in the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship group at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Before joining the faculty at Minnesota, he earned his PhD in economic sociology at the University of Michigan, where he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies. He earned his AB from the University of Chicago. During that time, he also worked at Argonne National Laboratory in the Materials Science Division.

His research has appeared or is forthcoming in leading management and health care journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Medical Care, and Annals of Surgery. His work has received recognition from several different professional societies, including the Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Technology and Innovation Management Division and the James D. Thompson Award (honorable mention), given by the American Sociological Association’s section on Organizations, Occupations and Work. 

Funk’s research is driven by the idea that the growing availability of large administrative, government, and web data sets create novel opportunities for management research, and he has been active in applying the tools of big data to social science. These efforts have led to invited presentations and meetings with data science groups at organizations including the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory's Computation Institute, Internet2, Microsoft, Michigan's Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure, and the Gordon and Betty Moore and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations. While at the University of Michigan, he was the founding chair of a users group aimed at exploring the intersection of big data and organizational studies.