---
id: people/joshua-epstein
about:
  label: Joshua M. Epstein
  description: >-
    Epidemiologist at New York University and a pioneer of agent-based
    modelling; co-author of Sugarscape and author of Generative Social Science.
  tags:
    - agent-based
    - epidemiology
    - social simulation
person:
  affiliation: New York University School of Global Public Health
  role: epidemiologist and agent-based modeller
  homepage: 'https://publichealth.nyu.edu/faculty/joshua-epstein'
relations:
  - predicate: member_of
    target: organizations/santa-fe-institute
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Joshua Epstein (NYU School of Global Public Health)
      url: 'https://publichealth.nyu.edu/faculty/joshua-epstein'
    - title: Joshua M. Epstein (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_M._Epstein'
    - title: >-
        The Future of Agent-Based Modeling: Insights from Josh Epstein (The
        Flux, episode notes in the feed)
      url: 'https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2343304.rss'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Joshua M. Epstein is Professor of Epidemiology at the NYU School of Global Public Health and founding director of the NYU Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory, with affiliated appointments at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the College of Arts and Science.[^1] Born in New York City, he took a BA at Amherst College and a PhD in political science at MIT in 1981.[^2] From 1987 to 2010 he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of its Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. He then moved to Johns Hopkins as Professor of Emergency Medicine and director of its Center for Advanced Modeling.[^1,2] He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.[^2]

His method is agent-based modelling, and he has applied it to infectious diseases such as smallpox, pandemic influenza and Ebola, to urban disaster preparedness, contagious violence, the evolution of norms, economic dynamics, computational archaeology and the emergence of social classes.[^1] He received an NIH Director's Pioneer Award for the work in 2008.[^1] His book *Generative Social Science* (Princeton, 2006) is about explaining social patterns by generating them from agents.[^1,2] In *Agent_Zero* (Princeton, 2013) he offers an alternative to the rational actor, an agent with emotional and social as well as cognitive parts.[^1,3]

With [Robert Axtell](/people/robert-axtell/) he wrote [Growing Artificial Societies](/media/growing-artificial-societies/) (1996), the book of the Sugarscape model. He was the guest on the first episode of the podcast [The Flux](/media/the-flux/), talking about where agent-based modelling is going.[^3]