I am a researcher with the professional purpose of promoting sustainable citizen empowerment strategies to improve the living conditions of society. I analyze the complex relationships between natural resources and community.

I am an agent-based modeller at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. I specialise in large-scale modelling of social and socio-ecological systems, with a particular focus on simulating stressors and process that could give rise to transformational change. To date, my research has focused on food and agricultural systems, rural economies, and the WASH sector, with much of it informed by firsthand fieldwork in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I am also interested in leveraging open science, participatory research, quantitative ethnography, and grounded theory within modelling processes to collaboratively generate nuanced insights into individual behaviour and societal dynamics. I received the Open Science Award from the International Land Use Study Centre in 2023 for such work. I currently co-lead the European Social Simulation Association’s Special Interest Group on Modelling Transformative Change and I am the Associate Director of the Centre for Empirical Agent-Based Modelling at the James Hutton Institute.

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior department at the University of Minnesota. My research involves using agent-based models combined with lab and field research to test a broad range of hypotheses in biology. I am currently developing an agent-based model of animal cell systems to investigate the epigenetic mechanisms that influence cell behavior. For my PhD work, I created a model, B3GET, which simulates the evolution of virtual primates to better understand the relationships between growth and development, life history and reproductive strategies, mating strategies, foraging strategies, and how ecological factors drive these relationships. I have also conducted fieldwork to inform the modeled behavior of these virtual organisms. Here I am pictured with an adult male gelada in Ethiopia!

I am a University Academic Fellow (UAF) in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. My research areas are agent-based modelling, decision making in complex systems, AI and multi-agent systems, urban analytics and housing markets. I obtained PhD in Economics from Iowa State University under supervisor Prof. Leigh Tesfatsion in 2014. I worked as a researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland between 2014 and 2019. I joined the University of Leeds as a UAF of Urban Analytics in 2019. I am originally from Shanghai, China.

I am a cognitive and behavioural economist, heterodox economist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of CHIETI-PESCARA, Italy. Before this, I worked at Procter & Gamble.I hold a PhD in the Human Science curriculum in Economics and Statistics from the University of CHIETI-PESCARA, and an MS in management, finance and development from the University of CHIETI-PESCARA.
I am also a board member of the Society of Experimental Finance and the Italian Post-Keynesian Society.
In my spare time, I enjoy travel, reading, jogging, and coding.

Science is most interesting when it subverts expectations. As a medic in the army, I used to think of the world in terms of strict hierarchies; some central governing agency gives orders, which trickle down the chain of command. However, it turns out that most biological systems do not work this way, instead distributing control among the members of the group (be they genes, cells, animals). I have since dedicated my research career to understanding how this works. Currently, I am a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems, which is the same university where I received my PhD.