I am Professor in Computational Resilience Economics at the University of Twente (the Netherlands), which I joined in 2010. In September 2017 I also joined University of Technology Sydney (Australia) as Professor of Computational Economic Modeling working with spatial simulation models to study socioeconomic impacts of disasters and emergence of resilience across scales. I was honored to be elected as a Member of the De Jonge Akademie of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (DJA/ KNAW in 2016) and of Social Sciences Council (SWR/KNAW in 2017). From 2009 to 2015 I have been working part-time as an economist at Deltares – the leading Dutch knowledge institute in the field of water management – specializing in economics of climate change, with focus on floods and droughts management.
I am interested in the feedbacks between policies and aggregated outcomes of individual decisions in the context of spatial and environmental policy-making. The issue of social interactions and information diffusion through networks to affect economic behavior is highly relevant here. My research line focuses on exploring how behavioral changes at micro level may lead to critical transitions (tipping points/regime shifts) on macro level in complex adaptive human-environment systems in application to climate change economics. I use agent-based modelling (ABM) combined with social science methods of behavioral data collection on individual decisions and social networks. This research line has been distinguished by the NWO VENI and ERC Starting grants and the Early Career Excellence award of the International Environmental Modeling Society (iEMSs). In 2018 I was invited to serve as the Associate Editor of the Environmental Modelling & Software journal, where I have been a regular Member of the Editorial Board since 2013.
I have a BS in Earth Sciences and a PhD in Resource and Environmental Economics. I have more than 25 years of experience doing research and teaching and advising students in systems thinking, scenario development, simulation, and ecological economics. Presently, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational & Data Sciences at George Mason University, and a member of the Center for Social Complexity. I teach the introductory courses on Computational Social Sciences at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as beginning and advanced courses in complex systems, modeling, and simulation. My current research focuses on the use of scenario development and integrated modeling as applied to social-ecological systems. My recent work has focused on applying these to issues related to climate change economics and policy, including new technologies for greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management.
My initial training was in cadastre and geodesy (B.Eng from the Distrital University, UD, Colombia). After earning my Master’s degree in Geography (UPTC, Colombia) in 2003, I worked for the “José Benito Vives de Andreis” marine and coastal research institute (INVEMAR) and for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Three years later, in 2006, I left Colombia to come to Canada, where I began a PhD in Geography with a specialization in modelling complex systems at Simon Fraser University (SFU), under the direction of Dr. Suzana Dragicevic (SAMLab). In my dissertation I examined the topic of spatial and temporal modelling of insect epidemics and their complex behaviours. After obtaining my PhD in 2011, I began postdoctoral studies at the University of British Columbia (2011) and the University of Victoria (2011-2013), where I worked on issues concerning the spatial and temporal relationships between changes in indirect indicators of biodiversity and climate change.
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Montreal. My research interests center around the incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques into the development Agent-Based Models to solve complex socio-ecological problems in different kind of systems, such as urban, forest and wetland ecosystems.
The core of my research projects aim to learn more about spatial and temporal interactions and relationships driving changes in our world, by focusing on the multidisciplinary nature of geographical information science (GIScience) to investigate the relationships between ecological processes and resulting spatial patterns. I integrate spatial analysis and modeling approaches from geographic information science (GIScience) together with computational intelligence methods and complex systems approaches to provide insights into complex problems such as climate change, landscape ecology and forestry by explicitly representing phenomena in their geographic context.
Specialties: Agent-based modeling, GIScience, Complex socio-environmental systems, Forestry, Ecology
The Global Resource Observatory (GRO)
The Global Resource Observatory is largest single research project being undertaken at the GSI, it investigates how the scarcity of finite resources will impact global social and political fragility in the short term. The ambitious three year project, funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, will enable short term decision making to account for ecological and financial constraints of a finite planet.
GRO will include an open source multidimensional model able to quantify the likely short term interactions of the human economy with the carrying capacity of the planet and key scarce resources. The model will enable exploration of the complex interconnections between the resource availability and human development, and provides projections over the next 5 years.
Data and scenarios will be geographically mapped to show the current and future balance and distribution of resources across and within countries. The GRO tool will, for the first time, enable the widespread integration of the implications of depleting key resource into all levels of policy and business decision-making.
Leigh Tesfatsion received the Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Minnesota, Mpls., in 1975, with a minor in mathematics. She is Research Professor of Economics, Professor Emerita of Economics, and Courtesy Research Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, all at Iowa State University. Her principal current research areas are electric power market design and the development of Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) platforms for the performance testing of these designs. She is the recipient of the 2020 David A. Kendrick Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Computational Economics (SCE) and an IEEE Senior Member. She has served as guest editor and associate editor for a number of journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the Journal of Energy Markets, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, and Computational Economics. Online Short Bio
Agent-based computational economics (ACE); development and use of ACE test beds for the study of electric power market operations; development and use of ACE test beds for the study of water, energy, and climate change
I am a computational archaeologist interested in how individuals and groups respond to both large scale processes such as climate change and local processes such as violence and wealth inequality. I am currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University.
My dissertation research focuses on experimenting with paleoecological data (e.g., pollen) to assess whether or not different approaches are feasible for paleoclimatic field reconstructions. In addition, I will also use pollen data to generate vegetation (biome) reconstructions. By using tree-ring and pollen data, we can gain a better understanding of the paleoclimate and the spatial distribution of vegetation communities and how those changed over time. These data can be used to better understand changes in demography and how people responded to environmental change.
In Summer 2019, I attended the Santa Fe Institute‘s Complex Systems Summer School, where I got to work in a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary international scientific community. For one of my projects, I got to merry my love of Sci-fi with complexity and agent-based modeling. Sci-fi agent-based modeling is an anthology and we wanted to build a community of collaborators for exploring sci-fi worlds. We also have an Instagram page (@Scifiabm).