Rob Axtell

Rob Axtell is department chair of the new Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, U.S.A. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (Washington, D.C., U.S.A.) and a founding member of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics there. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA).

He teaches courses on agent-based modelling, mathematical modelling, and game theory. His research is situated at the intersection of economics, behavioural game theory, and multi-agent systems computer science. His most recent research attempts to emerge a macroeconomy from tens of millions of interacting agents.

His research has been published in “Science”, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA”, and leading field journals. Popular accounts have appeared in newspapers, magazines, books, online, on the radio and in museums. He is the developer of Sugarscape, an early attempt to integrate social science with multi-agent systems, and co-author of Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (MIT Press 1996).