Rate My Professor Andy Pilny

Andrew Pilny is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Kentucky, where he holds the Douglas A. and Carole A. Boyd Professorship in Communication. He maintains a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and serves as a member of the Center for Computational Sciences. Pilny earned his Bachelor of Arts in 2008, Master of Arts in 2010, and Doctor of Philosophy in 2015, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests encompass communication and social sciences, with expertise linked to UN Sustainable Development Goals including good health and well-being, decent work and economic growth, climate action, and peace, justice, and strong institutions. Pilny joined the University of Kentucky as an Assistant Professor in 2015 and advanced to Associate Professor. He received the 2020 Kirwan Prize for outstanding faculty, the 2017 College of Communication and Information Faculty Research Award, the Group Communication Division Ernest Bormann Research Award in 2018, the Karl Wallace Award for Outstanding Research in 2015, Top Paper Panel Award and Top 4 Paper Award in 2014, and the Ernest Bormann Best Book Award shared with M. S. Poole in 2018.

Pilny's scholarship includes 34 articles, 13 book chapters, 6 conference contributions, and 1 book. Notable publications feature 'Coding Small Group Communication with AI: RNNs and Transformers with Context' with J. Bonito and A. Schecter in Small Group Research (2025), 'Artificial intelligence and organizational communication' with P. Leonardi, J. Treem, and N. Sharma in the Handbook of Organizational Communication Theory and Research (2024), 'From manual to machine: assessing the efficacy of large language models in content analysis' with K. McAninch, A. Slone, and K. Moore in Communication Research Reports (2024), 'Understanding Desired Greater Collaboration Ties: Tie-Strengthening and Bypassing Approaches for Managing Formal Workflow Network Dependencies' with S. W. Yang et al. in Personnel Psychology (2026), and 'Social Networks' with A. Schecter in The Routledge Handbook of Communication and Social Cognition (2026). His work appears in journals such as Small Group Research and Personnel Psychology. Pilny has secured grants including a National Science Foundation award for 'A Multidimensional Network Approach to Financial Organization of Life Outcomes' (2025-2027), Office of the Vice President for Research funding for 'CI-GPT- OVPR Curate Program' (2024-2025) and 'Building a Mini-Super Computer for Social Good' (2020-2021), and collaboration on 'Spiders in the Web: A Social Network Analysis of Dependency in U.S. Industrial Agriculture' (2021-2023).