Robert Axtell

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 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 (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