Uri Wilensky

Uri Wilensky is the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Learning Sciences, Computer Science and Complex Systems at Northwestern University.¹ He founded and directs the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL), co-founded the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, and co-directs the joint PhD programme in computer science and learning sciences.¹ He studied mathematics and philosophy at Brandeis and mathematics at Harvard, and took his PhD at the MIT Media Lab.²

He first developed NetLogo in 1999.² His lab maintains it, and his page calls it the most widely used agent-based modelling software, with hundreds of thousands of users in research and education. He has published more than 300 articles and more than 500 agent-based models.¹ His theory of "restructurations" holds that representing knowledge in computational media changes how people think and learn: students can make sense of a complex system by building and exploring a model in which agents follow simple rules and large patterns emerge.² With William Rand he wrote An Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (MIT Press, 2015).¹ His awards include the 2016 ISDDE prize for excellence in design, for NetLogo, and the 2025 Yidan Prize for education research, and he is a fellow of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.¹

He is the maker of NetLogo.