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, including her upcoming book, "Dawn of the Creative Mind: The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Innovation," will be released next year by Cambridge University Press. She 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. She is also a published fiction writer and composes music for piano.