Liane Gabora is an interdisciplinary psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on how culture evolves, how the creative process works, and the role of creativity and innovation in cultural evolution, using both experimental studies with humans and computational models.
Her complex systems based approach to creative cultural evolution uses autocatalytic networks and reflexive autocatalytic foodset-generated sets (RAFs) to model how ideas evolve over time as different people adapt them to their own needs, tastes, and perspectives, treating insight as self-organized criticality. She also works in the computational creativity domain, contributing to computational art and music generation programs.
Dr. Gabora has almost 200 scholarly publications in peer reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings, has obtained over one million dollars in research grants, and was the 2011 winner of the Berlyne Award for Outstanding Research by a junior scholar from the American Psychological Association. She has given invited lectures at universities and other institutions worldwide including Schloss Dagstuhl in Wadern, Germany, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, University College London, University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, University of Arizona inTucson, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, World Expo 2010, Shanghai, China, University of California at Long Beach,University of California at San Bernardino, Yale University, Harvard University Divinity School, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany, University of Utrecht in The Netherlands, Universite Rene Descartes in Paris, University of California, Berkeley, as well as keynote speeches at numerous events including the First Creative Industry Forum, Mexico City and workshops at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, and the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. She is also a published fiction writer and composes music for piano.