Elizabeth Hunter received a BA in Mathematics and Economics at Boston University in 2011. She worked as a health economics researcher at Research Triangle Institute for three years where she worked on a team that developed the risk adjustment models for the US health insurance exchanges. She attended the University of Limerick and received an MSc in Mathematical Modelling in 2015. She completed a PhD at Technological University Dublin. Her PhD research focuses on agent-based simulations for infectious disease epidemiology with the goal of creating an agent-based simulation of Ireland. Elizabeth is currently working on the Precise4Q as a Postdoctoral researcher working on predictive modelling in stroke.

Farzaneh Davari is a social science researcher who has worked in many diverse fields, including agriculture, conflict, health, and human rights, just to name a few. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in Computational Social Science, focusing on social-ecological complex systems and applying computational science and Agent-Based Modeling to understand resilience procedure through self-organizing and learning. Meanwhile, she is a designer and instructor of the online graduate level course of Decision-making in Complex Environments in Virginia Tech.

I am a software developer at Arizona State University involved in different projects including CoMSES Net, where I help maintain and work towards increasing the utility we provide for a community of researchers.

I received a PhD in Ecology from Duke University in 2006. I have been a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Illinois Chicago since 2008

Dr. William G. Kennedy, “Bill,” is continuing to learn in a third career, this time as an academic, a computational social scientist.

His first a career was in military service as a Naval Officer, starting with the Naval Academy, Naval PostGraduate School (as the first computer science student from the Naval Academy), and serving during the Cold War as part of the successful submarine-based nuclear deterrent. After six years of active duty service, he served over two decades in the Naval Reserves commanding three submarine and submarine-related reserve units and retiring after 30 years as a Navy Captain with several personal honors and awards.

His second career was in civilian public service: 10 years at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and 15 years with the Department of Energy. At the NRC he rose to be an advisor to the Executive Director for Operations and the authority on issues concerning the reliance on human operators for reactor safety, participating in two fly-away accident response teams. He left the NRC for a promotion and to lead, as technical director, the entrepreneurial effort to explore the use of light-water and accelerator technologies for the production of nuclear weapons materials. That work led to him becoming the senior policy officer responsible for strategic planning and Departmental performance commitments, leading development of the first several DOE strategic plans and formal performance agreements between the Secretary of Energy and the President.

Upon completion of doctoral research in Artificial Intelligence outside of his DOE work, he began his third career as a scientist. That started with a fully funded, three-year post-doctoral research position in cognitive robotics at the Naval Research Laboratory sponsored by the National Academy of Science and expanding his AI background with research in experimental Cognitive Science. Upon completion, he joined the Center for Social Complexity, part of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University in 2008 where he is now the Senior Scientific Advisor. His research interests range from cognition at the individual level to models of millions of agents representing individual people. He is currently leading a multi-year project to characterize the reaction of the population of a mega-city to a nuclear WMD (weapon of mass destruction) event.

Dr. Kennedy holds a B.S. in mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy, and Master of Science in Computer Science from the Naval PostGraduate School, and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from George Mason University and has a current security clearance. Dr. Kennedy is a member of Sigma Xi, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a life member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a STEM volunteer with the Senior Scientists and Engineers/AAAS Volunteer Program for K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in the DC-area schools.

Paul Hart BSc (Liverpool), BA (Open University), PhD (Liverpool), MAE, FLS, FMBA. From 1973-1976 I worked on the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey at the Oceanographic Laboratory, Edinburgh. From 1973 – 1976 I was employed by Nordreco AB (a Nestlé R & D company) in Sweden as a fishery biologist where he advised the Findus group on fish raw material supplies and assessed the future potential of aquaculture. In 1976 I moved to the University of Leicester as a lecturer in aquatic biology. My research focused on the foraging behaviour of fish with a side interest in marine commercial fisheries. I retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Biology and am now an Emeritus Professor. I was a Trustee of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, which ran the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey until it was merged with the Marine Biological Association: I then became a Trustee of the MBA. From 2010 – 2016 I was a member of the Science Advisory Board of Marine Scotland. I am co-author of Fisheries Ecology (1982) and co-editor of the two-volume Handbook of Fish Biology and Fisheries (2002). I was a co-editor of the journal Fish and Fisheries (Wiley) between 2000 and 2021.

I am a lowly civil servant moonlighting as a PhD student interested in urban informatics, Smart Cities, artificial intelligence/machine learning, all-things geospatial and temporal, advanced technologies, agent-based modeling, and social complexity… and enthusiastically trying to find a combination thereof to form a disseration. Oh… and I would like to win the lottery.