Soum Padhee joined Lenoir-Rhyne in 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Management. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Northeastern University, with additional graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and RWTH Aachen. His expertise spans collective intelligence, industrial engineering, and social network analytics, with published research in Research Policy, Strategic Management Society, Systems Engineering, and INFORMS journals. Before academia, he spent more than four years in the automobile industry across emerging and high-wage economies, leading work from the shop floor through corporate operations strategy. He is a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt. His research focuses on advancing the science of collective intelligence by exploring how groups of individuals and AI agents can work together more effectively, optimizing information exchange, and building resilient systems that leverage diverse perspectives, behaviors, and access to knowledge in socio-technical environments.