Network Members

Abdullah Almaatouq is a computational social scientist and Assistant Professor at MIT. His research spans three streams: (1) studying and improving collective decision-making systems, such as teams, committees, crowds, markets, and elections; (2) examining metascientific questions to enhance research methods and practice in the social and behavioral sciences; and (3) developing research tools and infrastructure for broader use in the scientific community. Abdullah is affiliated with the MIT Center for Computational Engineering, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative, and the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Joshua Becker

Joshua Becker is an Associate Professor at the UCL School of Management. Joshua received a PhD in Communication from the University in Pennsylvania, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and the Kellogg School of Management. Prior to graduate school, Joshua worked professionally in conflict mediation, and currently volunteers as a neighbor mediator in London. Joshua’s research uses formal modleing and controlled experiments to study how teams, organizations, and networks can optimize performance on tasks such as innovation, decision making, and forecasting. Joshua’s current research agenda focuses on how groups can effectively reach consensus amidst disagreement.

Stephen Broomell

Stephen Broomell is an Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Purdue Institute for a Sustainable Future. His research investigates how people perceive and communicate uncertainty in various domains, such as climate change, health, and security. He uses experimental methods, surveys, and computational models to understand how people form judgments, make decisions, and learn from feedback under uncertainty.

Cathy Buerger

Dr. Cathy Buerger is the Director of Research at the Dangerous Speech Project, where her work is dedicated to understanding and mitigating harmful speech and its role in inciting violence. With a PhD in Anthropology, Dr. Buerger’s work focuses on how online speech can influence offline violence, how qualitative methods can help us understand the impact of interventions to counter dangerous speech, and how to foster constructive dialogue across social divides. She has published widely on issues related to dangerous speech, counterspeech, and collective action.

Mirta Galesic

Mirta Galesic is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Resident Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, and External Professor at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, UVM. She is also an Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce seemingly complex social phenomena.

David Garcia

David Garcia is a Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research applies complex systems theory and computational methods to study human behavior in social systems, such as online communities, social networks, and collective emotions. He uses large-scale data analysis, agent-based modeling, and network science to investigate how social phenomena emerge from individual interactions.

Robert Goldstone

Robert Goldstone is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. His research interests include concept learning and representation, perceptual learning, educational applications of cognitive science, decision-making, collective behavior, and computational modeling of human cognition.

Cleotilde Gonzalez

Cleotilde Gonzalez is a Full Research Professor of Cognitive Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also the Founding Director of the Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory (DDMLab) and the Co-Director of the AI Institute for Societal Decision Making. She is affiliated with the Cylab Security and Privacy Institute, the Human Computer Interaction Institute and the Software and Societal Systems Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a lifetime fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Her research explores how people learn and make decisions in complex and dynamic environments, such as cybersecurity, emergency response, and health care. She uses cognitive models, experimental methods, and computer simulations to understand how people adapt to changing situations and feedback.

Ulrike Hahn

Ulrike Hahn is a Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck University of London. She is also the Director of the Centre for Cognition Computation & Modelling (CCCM). Her research investigates how people reason and argue in natural language settings, such as politics, law, and science. She uses experiments, computational modelling and formal methods, such as Bayesian models, logic, and probability theory, to analyze how people evaluate evidence, draw inferences, and persuade others.

Cecilia Heyes

Cecilia Heyes is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences and Professor of Psychology at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Cognitive Science Society, as well as past-President of the Experimental Psychology Society. Her research focuses on the evolution of cognition, particularly the interplay between natural selection, learning, developmental processes, and culture in shaping adult human cognitive abilities. She is especially interested in social cognition and most of her current projects examine the possibility that the neurocognitive mechanisms enabling cultural inheritance - social learning, imitation, mirror neurons, mind reading, etc - are themselves products of cultural evolution.

Gaël Le Mens

Gaël Le Mens is a Professor of Behavioral Science at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Department of Economics and Business, Barcelona. He is also an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) and at the UPF Barcelona School of Management (UPF-BSM). His research focuses on how the social environment and learning processes affect inference, judgment and valuation. His current theoretical focus is on developing models of the influence of categories on inference and valuation, and models of the dynamics of collective valuation and popularity. In his most recent work, he is investigating how large language models (LLMs) can uncover the semantics of concepts and how large language models can be used for ideological scaling of political texts. He tests the predictions of his models using a variety of methods, such as the analysis of text data using deep learning and a combination of online and laboratory experiments.

Stephan Lewandowsky

Stephan Lewandowsky is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol and Guest Professor in Psychology at the University of Potsdam. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS), a member of the German Academy of Science (Leopoldina), and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. His research explores how people process and remember information, especially in situations involving misinformation, uncertainty, and conflict. He uses experimental methods, surveys, and computational models to understand how people form beliefs, update their knowledge, and cope with cognitive challenges.

Henrik Olsson

Henrik Olsson is Resident Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on understanding how properties of individual decision strategies and social network structures affect belief dynamics and group performance by connecting research in social cognition and decision-making with insights from physics, statistics, and machine learning.

Marcus Pivato

Marcus Pivato is a Professor at the Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne, at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His main research interest is normative economic theory —in particular, social choice theory, social welfare theory, and normative decision theory. This uses mathematics to better understand how individuals and groups should make decisions. He is also interested in other topics in mathematics, philosophy, and economic theory.

Kai Spiekermann

Kai Spiekermann is a Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research spans democratic theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, and broader topics within politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE). Spiekermann combines normative and positive approaches to explore political phenomena. Utilizing formal methods such as game theory, network theory, and social choice theory, Spiekermann investigates the interactions, information exchange, and influence among political actors.

Mark Steyvers

Mark Steyvers is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, lrvine. He is also a Member of the Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences (CTBS) and the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (CMLIS). His research applies machine learning and probabilistic modeling to study human cognition, especially in domains involving memory, categorization, decision-making, and language. He uses computational methods, such as Bayesian inference, topic modeling, and neural networks, to analyze large-scale behavioral and textual data.

Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron

Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron is a Professor and Head of the Computational Social Science Group at the Department of Science, Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Management, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. She is Rector's Proxy for Academia Iuvenum at Wroclaw Tech, a programme of excellence that brings together young scientists from different scientific disciplines. She is a member of the board of the European Physical Society (EPS) "Statistical and Non-Linear Physics" and of the Polish Physical Society (PTF) "Physics in Economics and Social Sciences". Her research applies statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics to study social systems, such as opinion formation, social influence, collective behavior, and cooperation. She uses analytical methods, numerical simulations, and agent-based models to investigate how microscopic interactions lead to macroscopic patterns.

Stefan Thurner

Stefan Thurner is a Full Professor of Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. He is also the President of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). His research covers a wide range of topics in complex systems science, such as network theory, evolutionary dynamics, social physics, computational social science, and systemic risk. He uses mathematical models, computer simulations, and data analysis to understand the emergence and evolution of complex phenomena.

Hyejin Youn

Hyejin Youn is an Associate Professor of Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management and a Research Affiliate at Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Her research explores how innovation emerges from complex adaptive systems, such as cities, languages, technologies, and cultures. She uses data-driven methods, such as network analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning, to study how novel combinations of existing elements generate new forms and functions.

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