I studied Mathematics at Oxford (1979-1983) then did youth work in inner city areas for the Educational Charity. After teaching in Grenada in the West Indies we came back to the UK, where the first job I could get was in a 6th form college (ages 16-18). They sent me to do post16 PCGE, which was so boring that I also started a part-time PhD. The PhD was started in 1992 and was on the meaning and definition of the idea of “complexity”, which I had been pondering for a few years. Given the growth of the field of complexity from that time, I had great fun reading almost anything in the library but I did finally finish it in 1999. Fortunately I got a job at the Centre for Policy Modelling (CfPM) in 1994 with its founder and direction, Scott Moss. We were doing agent-based social simulation then, but did not know it was called this and did not meet other such simulators for a few years. With Scott Moss we built the CfPM into one of the leading research centres in agent-based social simulation in the world. I became director of the CfPM just before Scott retired, and later became Professor of Social Simulation in 2013. For more about me see http://bruce.edmonds.name or http://cfpm.org.

Klaus G. Troitzsch was a full professor of computer applications in the social sciences at the University of Koblenz-Landau since 1986 until he officially retired in 2012 (but continues his academic activities). He took his first degree as a political scientist. After eight years in active politics in Hamburg and after having taken his PhD, he returned to academia, first as a senior researcher in an election research project at the University of Koblenz-Landau, from 1986 as full professor of computer applications in the social sciences. His main interests in teaching and research are social science methodology and, especially, modelling and simulation in the social sciences.
Among his early research projects there is the MIMOSE project which developed a declarative functional simulation language and tool for micro and multilevel simulation between 1986 and 1992. Several EU funded projects were devoted to social simulation and policy modelling, the most recent from 2012 to 2015 combining data/text mining and agent-based simulation to analyse the global dynamics of extortion racket systems.
He authored, co-authored, and co-edited several books and many articles in social simulation, and he organised or co-organised a number of national and international conferences in this field. Over nearly three decades he advised and/or supervised more than 55 PhD theses, most of them in the field of social simulation. He offered annual summer and spring courses in social simulation between 1997 and 2009; more recent courses of this kind are now being organised by the European Social Simulation Assiciation and held at different places all over Europe (mostly with his contributions).