Joshua M. Epstein

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 he wrote Growing Artificial Societies (1996), the book of the Sugarscape model. He was the guest on the first episode of the podcast The Flux, talking about where agent-based modelling is going.³