---
id: people/robert-axtell
about:
  label: Robert Axtell
  description: >-
    Computational social scientist at George Mason University who built
    Sugarscape, the model behind Growing Artificial Societies (1996), with
    Joshua Epstein.
  tags:
    - agent-based
    - social simulation
    - sugarscape
person:
  affiliation: George Mason University
  role: computational social scientist
  homepage: 'https://css1.gmu.edu/~axtell/Rob/Home.html'
relations:
  - predicate: member_of
    target: organizations/santa-fe-institute
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Robert Axtell (his page at George Mason University)
      url: 'https://css1.gmu.edu/~axtell/Rob/Home.html'
    - title: Robert Axtell (GMU College of Science directory)
      url: 'https://science.gmu.edu/directory/robert-axtell'
    - title: Robert Axtell (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Axtell'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Robert L. Axtell is Professor of Computational Social Science at George Mason University, affiliated with its Center for Social Complexity.[^2] His own page says he chairs the Department of Computational Social Science, part of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, co-directs the Computational Public Policy Lab, and has been an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years.[^1] He took an undergraduate degree at the University of Detroit and an interdisciplinary PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992.[^1,2]

He met [Joshua Epstein](/people/joshua-epstein/) as a graduate student and joined him at the Brookings Institution in 1992; he left for George Mason in 2007.[^3] At Brookings he was a fellow in foreign policy studies and then a senior fellow in economic studies and governance studies, and with colleagues created the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics.[^1] While there he also taught microeconomics and agent-based computing at several universities.[^1] In the 2013-14 academic year he was visiting professor of complexity economics at Oxford.[^1]

Axtell developed Sugarscape. It is the model at the centre of [Growing Artificial Societies](/media/growing-artificial-societies/) (1996), the book he wrote with Epstein.[^3] He describes the book as an early statement that social science can be done with software agents.[^1]