Scott Heckbert (PhD 2010) is the Principal Environmental Scientist at the Alberta Energy Regulator, and an Adjunct Professor at University of Alberta and University of Lethbridge, Canada. Scott’s area of specialization is combining agent-based models, GIS, and 3D visualization. These technologies are used as digital laboratories where scientists, decision makers, and stakeholders can interact for improved understanding of complex social-environmental systems.

Eric has graduate degrees in urban planning and policy and sociology and an undergraduate degree in biology. He has worked on multiple collaborative and interdisciplinary projects and is skilled at engaging communities and other stakeholders. He is adept at qualitative research and has earned a Certificate in Geospatial Analysis and Visualization, demonstrating proficiency in Adobe Suite, ArcGIS, agent-based modeling and system dynamics modeling. He is currently writing manuscripts for publication based on his work on motivating energy retrofit decisions, energy-related urban planning, municipal decision-making on infrastructure investments, and other work on resilience and sustainability.

Peter Gerbrands is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the of Utrecht University School of Economics, where is develops the data infrastructure for FIRMBACKBONE. He teaches data science courses: “Applied Data Analysis and Visualization” and “Introduction to R”. His research interests are agent-based simulations, social network analysis, complex systems, big data analysis, statistical learning, and computational social science. He applies his skills primarily for policy analysis, especially related to illicit financial flows, i.e. tax evasion, tax avoidance and money laundering and has published in Regulation & Governance, and EPJ Data Science. Prior to becoming an academic, Peter had a long career in IT consulting. In Fall 2023, he is a Visiting Research Scholar at SUNY Binghamton in NY.

Dr. Aaron Bramson is principal investigator of the AI Strategy Center of GA technologies in Tokyo, Japan, as well as an Affiliate Researcher in the Department of General Economics of Ghent University in Belgium. His research specialty is complexity science, especially methodologies for modeling complex systems. Research topics span across disciplines: measures of polarization and diversity, belief measure interoperability, integrating geospatial and network analyses for measuring walkability and neighborhood identification, and myriad applications in artificial intelligence and data visualization. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in a joint program with the departments of Political Science and Philosophy as well as an M.S. in Mathematics from Northeastern University.

Professor, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Professor, School of Complex Adaptive Systems
Affiliate Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration
Arizona State University