Professor Barry Wellman studies networks: community, communication, computer, and social. His research examines virtual community, the virtual workplace, social support, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods. Based at the University of Toronto, he directs NetLab, is the S.D. Clark Professor at the Department of Sociology, does research at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, the Knowledge Media Design Institute, and the Bell University Laboratories' Collaborative Effectiveness Lab, and is a cross-appointed member of the Faculty of Information Studies.

Prof. Wellman is a member of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the Chair-Emeritus of both the Community and Information Technologies section and the Community and Urban Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. He is a Fellow of IBM Toronto's Centre for Advance Studies. He has worked with IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management, Mitel Networks, Advanced Micro Devices' Global Consumer Advisory Board, and Intel's People and Practices research unit. He has been a keynoter at conferences ranging from computer science to theology, and a committee member of the Social Science Research Council's (and Ford Foundation's) Program on Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security. He is the (co-)author of more than 200 articles that have been co-authored with more than 80 scholars, and is the (co-)editor of three books. He is currently co-authoring Networked: The New Social Operating System (with Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project) for MIT Press, to be published in 2011.