Simulating Religion Project: Advisory Board - Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion

The Simulating Religion Project is furtunate to be guided by a board of internationally renowned advisors. They are listed in this page, together with brief bios and links to further information.

Current Advisors

	Scott Atran CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, France Professor Atran's research and teaching interests are centered in the following areas: cognitive and linguistic anthropology, ethnobiology, environmental decision making, categorization and reasoning, evolutionary psychology, anthropology of science (history and philosophy of natural history and natural philosophy); Middle East ethnography and political economy; natural history of Lowland Maya, cognitive and commitment theories of religion, terrorism, and foreign affairs. Website
	Bharathy, Gnana K University of Pennsylvania, USA Dr. Gnana Barathy is a Researcher, Project Manager, and Consultant at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of research include risk management, analytics, and modeling and simulation, particularly of social systems. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and National Institute of Technology (formerly Regional Engineering College), Trichy, India. He also holds Project Management Professional certification and is a full member of Institution of Engineers Australia (MIEAust). Website
	Bourrat, Pierrick University of Sydney, Australia Dr. Bourrat is working as a postdoctoral fellow with Paul Griffiths on the ARC project "Conceptual and modeling tools for non-paradigmatic evolutionary processes". His background is in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Sydney in 2015. His thesis proposed new ways of understanding the natural selection by stripping it of its biological specificities. Website \| cv
	Braxton, Don Juniata College, usa Professor Braxton earned a bachelor's degree in religion and political science from Wittenberg University in 1986. He went on to earn a master's degree (divinity) in 1987 and a doctorate in Ethics and Society in 1993, both from the University of Chicago. Braxton has taught at DePaul University, Indiana University East, St. Norbert College, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and Capital University. Braxton writes and publishes in the field of Religion and Science. He also conducts research in religion and information technology. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, Institute for Religion in the Age of Science, the Society of Christian Ethics, the Midatlantic International Academy of Religion, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Website
	Brown, Candy Indiana University, usa Professor Brown is historian and ethnographer of religion and culture. Her particular focus is the United States, understood within the broader frameworks of the Americas and global cultural flows. Her first book, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), assesses how evangelicals interacted with the burgeoning print market of the mid-nineteenth century. Website
	Bulbulia Joseph Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Professor Bulbilia's research expertise is in the evolution of religion, broadly conceived. He is a core member of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) created by Chris G. Sibley (Auckland) in 2009, which is investigating values in a large longitudinal sample of 18,000 New Zealanders each year. His research interests also include cultural phylogenetics, with Russell Gray (Max Planck), Quentin Atkinson (Auckland), Simon Greenhill (ANU), and Joseph Watts (Auckland), testing evolutionary hypotheses about religion using a rich database of Austronesian cultures constructed for this purpose. Professor Bulbilia uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and models drawn mainly from the biological and social sciences. Website \| cv
	Busemeyer, Jerome Indiana UNIVERSITY, usa Dr. Busemeyer is an expert in dynamic, emotional, and cognitive models of judgment and decision-making; neural network models of function learning, interpolation, and extrapolation; methodology for comparing and testing complex models of behavior; and measurement theory with error contaminated data. He runs the Judgment and Decision Research Lab. Website
	Czachesz, István University of Tromsø Dr. Czachesz is a thinker with diverse interests. Not only is he an early Christianity historian (with an emphasis on the New Testament), but he is also a cognitive science of religion scholar. He maintains a website on cognitive science and religion, and he recently participated in the Early Christian Mind project looking at cognitive science and early Christian history. Website
	Da Rocha Costa, Antônio Carlos Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, brazil Professor Da Rocha Costa graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering (electronics option) from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (1977), a master's degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (1980), a specialization in Higher Education Methodology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (1981) and a PhD in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (1993). He is currently associate professor of the Graduate Program in Computer Engineering at FURG and the Graduate Program in Informatics in the Education UFRGS. Da Rocha Costa has experience in computer science, with an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence, having worked mainly in the study of the fundamentals of artificial intelligence and agent societies. Current interests also include the logic of social sciences, and the fundamentals of cognition. Website
	Gavin, Michael Colorado State University, usa Michael Gavin is an Associate Professor in the College of Natural Resources at Colorado State University, where he teaches graduate courses in the Conservation Leadership through Learning Masters Program and undergraduate courses in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources. He is also a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Previously He was based in the geography and environmental studies programs at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Professor Gavin's work draws on theory and methods from geography, anthropology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and economics to examine biocultural approaches to conservation, as well as the geography and evolution of cultural diversity. He and his students have conducted fieldwork in over a dozen countries. Website
	Geertz, Armin Arhaus University, Denmark Armin W. Geertz is Professor in the History of Religions, Director of the Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit (RCC) and MINDLab Coordinator of the Cognition and Culture Project at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is currently President Elect of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR). His many publications include New Approaches to the Study of Religion (edited with Peter Antes and Randi R. Warne, Berlin, 2004, two volumes) and Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture (Equinox Publishing, forthcoming 2012). Website \| cv
	Gilbert, Nigel University of Surrey, uk Dr. Nigel Gilbert read for a first degree in Engineering, intending to go into the computer industry. However, he was lured into sociology and obtained his doctorate on the sociology of scientific knowledge from the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Michael Mulkay. His research and teaching interests have reflected his continuing interest in both sociology and computer science (and engineering generally). His main research interests are processual theories of social phenomena, the development of computational sociology, and the methodology of computer simulation, especially agent-based modeling. He is Director of the Centre for Research in Social Simulation. He is also Director of the University's Institute of Advanced Studies and responsible for its development as a leading centre for intellectual interchange. He is the author or editor of several textbooks on sociological methods of research and statistics and editor of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. Website
	Gray, Russel University of Auckland, New Zealand Professor Gray has made significant contributions to the fields of linguistics, animal cognition, philosophy of biology and behavioral phylogenetics. He pioneered the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory. This work has helped solve the 200 year-old debate on the origin of Indo-European languages, dubbed by Diamond and Bellwood (2003) as “the most recalcitrant problem in historical linguistics. More recently, he used sophisticated Bayesian phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses about the sequence and timing of the peopling of the Pacific. His work with Dr Gavin Hunt on New Caledonian crows has revealed that their remarkable tool manufacturing skills are the product of a lengthy learning period and are underpinned by brains with large associative regions and the ability to make causal inferences. His research has attracted worldwide media attention including full page articles in The New York Times, Time and Le Monde and has featured on several international television documentaries. He has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters including seven papers in Nature and Science. Website
	Hackett, Conrad PEW research center, usa Conrad Hackett is a demographer at Pew Research Center. He is an expert on international religious demography and how religion influences population growth. Before joining Pew Research Center, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the University of Texas at Austin’s Population Research Center. Hackett received his doctorate from Princeton University’s Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research. He also earned two graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is an author of The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050, The Global Religious Landscape, Global Christianity, The Global Catholic Population and various other studies of religious demography. Hackett frequently presents demographic research at scholarly conferences in the United States and abroad. He has discussed global religion with numerous media outlets, including BBC, CNN, the Financial Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Website
	Henrich, Joseph University of British Columbia, Canada Professor Henrich's research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions. Methodologically, he integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with experimental techniques drawn from psychology and economics. His area interests include Amazonia, Chile and Fiji. Website \| Website \| cv
	Inglehart, Ron University of Michigan, usa Ronald Inglehart is the Lowenstein Professor of Political Science and a research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is also co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. Inglehart helped found the Euro-Barometer surveys and directs the World Values Survey, which has surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 97 countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. His research deals with changing belief systems and their impact on social and political change. Website \| cv
	Khan, Kenneth University of oxford, uk Dr. Kahn has been a senior researcher at the University of Oxford since 2006. He is leading the Modelling4All project that combines ideas of accessible agent-based modeling within a web 2.0 community. It builds upon the prior Constructing2Learn Project. He did research in technology enhanced leaning at the London Knowledge Lab and the Institute of Education from 1998 to 2014 where he participated in four large EU research projects, a BBC project, and two UK projects. He is the designer and developer of ToonTalk a programming system for children that provides concrete analogs of advanced computational abstractions with a video game look and feel. Recently he has begun to create ToonTalk Reborn an open-source web-based rethinking of ToonTalk. Website \| cv
	Legare, Cristine University of texas at austin, usa Dr. Legare is the director of the Cognition, Culture, and Development Lab. Her training and research reflect her commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of cognitive development. Dr. Legare studies the intersection of several topics in the field of cognitive development: causal reasoning, social learning, and the development of scientific and supernatural belief systems. Her approach is to integrate theory and research from cognitive psychology and anthropology to examine basic cognitive processes in particular content areas and cultural contexts. She has done extensive fieldwork in southern Africa, and is currently doing research in Brazil, China, and Vanuatu (a Melanesian archipelago), using both experimental and ethnographic methods. Website \| cv
	Luhrmann, Tanya Stanford university, usa Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her books include Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, (Harvard, 1989); The Good Parsi (Harvard 1996); Of Two Minds (Knopf 2000) and When God Talks Back (Knopf 2012). In general, her work focuses on the way that ideas held in the mind come to seem externally real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. One of her recent project compares the experience of hearing distressing voices in India and in the United States. Website \| cv
	McCauley, Robert Emory University, usa Dr. McCauley, Kenan University Professor of Philosophy at Emory University with associated appointments in psychology, religion, and anthropology, is a pioneer in the cognitive science of religion. In his view, our minds are better suited to religious belief than to scientific inquiry because the explanations that religion provides make intuitive sense to us and engage our natural cognitive systems, while science involves abstract thinking and forms of reflection that require a lot of mental work. He is currently examining the relationship between the cognitive and cultural foundations of religion and science. He is expert in philosophy of science (especially philosophy of psychology), cognitive science of religion, and naturalized epistemology. He is author of Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge, 1990) and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge, 2002), both with E. Thomas Lawson. He is also author of Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (Oxford, 2011). Website
	Mustafee, Navonil University of exeter, uk Professor Mustafee has research interests in operations management, in particular the application of modeling and simulation for informed decision making, and distributed systems. He has applied distributed computing technologies like desktop grid computing and the High Level Architecture (the IEEE1516 standard for distributed simulation) to execute large and complex simulations in application domains such as healthcare and banking. His current research explores the use of multiple Operations Research techniques and hybrid-simulation in the operations context. Professor Mustafee is externally co-supervising one PhD student who is working in the area of sustainable operations management. He welcomes PhD queries in simulation methodologies, modeling for sustainability, business intelligence and analytics, and topics in Operations Research. Website
	Nielbo, Kristoffer Arhaus University, Denmark Professor Nielbo specializes in the application of quantitative methods and computational tools to the analysis, interpretation, and storage of cultural data. He has participated in a range of collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects involving researchers from the humanities, social sciences, health sciences, and the natural sciences. His research covers two areas of interest of which one is more recent (automated text analysis) and the other (modeling of cultural behavior) has followed me throughout his academic career. Both interests explore the cultural information space in new and innovative ways by combining cultural data and humanities theories with statistics, computer algorithms, and data visualization. Website
	Norenzayan, Ara University of British Columbia, Canada Ara Norenzayan is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His research explores the psychology of religious thought and behavior, religious diversity, cooperation and conflict, issues of cultural variability and universality in human behavior, and cultural evolution, broadly conceived. He received a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan. He is the author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton). He is a Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, and the co-director of the Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC). Currently he is a co-investigator in the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), a major international research hub generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Ara has published widely in scientific journals such as Psychological Science, Science, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His research and findings have been featured in international media worldwide, such as the BBC, CNN, The New York Times Magazine, The New Scientist, The Globe and Mail, The Economist, and der Spiegel. He grew up in Beirut and lives in Vancouver. Website
	Smith, Eliot Indiana University, USA Professor Smith's research examines the ways people perceive members of their own and other social groups, evaluate them positively or negatively, and behave toward them. In particular, his recent research (in collaboration with Diane Mackie of the University of California, Santa Barbara) has focused on the role of emotions in prejudice and intergroup behavior. The core insight of social identity theory and related viewpoints such as self-categorization theory is that an important social group membership becomes part of a person's self. This assumption means that, like any aspect of the self, group membership takes on motivational and affective significance. A new theory of intergroup emotions arises from combining this assumption with appraisal theories of emotion. In this theory, prejudice involves emotional reactions to an out-group based on appraisals of its relationship to the in-group (such as threat). In turn, these group-based emotions may lead to discriminatory behaviors toward the out-group. Aspects of this new theory have been tested and confirmed in several studies. Website
	Purzycki, Benjamin University of British columbia, canada Dr. Purzycki is a cultural anthropologist who engages in the cognitive, evolutionary, and ethnographic study of religion. Presently, his attention is devoted to understanding how we make sense of gods' minds, and how explicit religious beliefs and rituals correspond to local pressures that require collective coordination. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic in southern Siberia to address these concerns. Website
	Sosis, Rich University of Connecticut Under the umbrella of human behavioral ecology, Professor Sosis' work on the “puzzle of cooperation” has been interdisciplinary, including perspectives from psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, sociology, and (his primary area of training), anthropology. His current work explores the relationship between religion, trust, and intra-group cooperation. Other research interests include optimal foraging theory, costly signaling, and the evolution of religion and morality. Professor Sosis' primary fieldwork has been conducted on Ifaluk Atoll of the Federated States of Micronesia and Israeli communes known as kibbutzim. He has also pursued ethnohistorical research on 19th century utopian communal societies and conducted economic experiments with various non-student populations in Israel and the United States. Website
	Steinhart, Eric William paterson University, USA Professor Steinhart got his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University at Stony Brook in 1996. He also received an MA in Philosophy from Boston College in 1988. He earned a BS in Computer Science from Penn State in 1983. Prof. Steinhart works mainly on metaphysical issues. He has written most recently on issues in philosophy of religion and philosophy of mathematics, and is especially interested in infinity. He has also written on Nietzsche, metaphor, artificial intelligence, robotics, transhumanism, Teilhard de Chardin, among other topics. Website
	Sun, Ron Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Professor Sun is a cognitive scientist investigating the fundamental nature of the human mind using various methodologies of cognitive science, and in particular computational modeling as a means of forging process-based comprehensive theories of the mind. He has played a leading role in developing hybrid systems for cognitive modeling. He has published more than 150 technical papers in journals such as Psychological Review, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Neural Networks, as well as 9 books by MIT Press, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press. His research interest lies in the study and modeling of cognitive agents, especially in their abilities to learn, reason, and act in the real world. More specifically, his research can be categorized into the following areas: human and machine learning, connectionist reasoning and knowledge representation, hybrid models, as well as multi-agent interaction and cognitive social simulation. Website
	Taves, Ann University of California, Santa Barbara Over time, the focus of Dr. Taves' research has shifted from answering historical questions about religion to using historical and ethnographic sources to explore how people make sense of ambiguous events and experiences that inhabit the indeterminate space between imagination and reality, craziness and inspiration, fiction and faith. She is particularly interested in experiences, people, objects, & events that people perceive and set apart as special and in the practices and alternate conceptions of reality that people oftentimes associate with them. Increasingly, Dr Taves' attention has turned to the processes whereby people–individually and collectively–come to perceive some things as extra-ordinary (or not); adjudicate such claims within and between groups, traditions, and cultures; and mobilize them in the construction of alternate realities via texts, networks, movements, and organizations. In exploring these processes, She works comparatively to generate the detailed descriptive analyses favored by scholars of religion and to explore the naturalistic explanations developed by researchers in the social and natural sciences. Empirically, she pursues this research primarily within the contexts of American religious history, the history of Christianity in the modern era, and the history of the scientific study of religion, psychology, and related phenomena (e.g., psychical phenomena, magic, and superstition). Theoretically, her work builds on classical theorists, such as Durkheim and Weber, as well as evolutionary and developmental approaches to the study of human behavior. Website \| cv
	Taylor, Simon Brunel University London, UK Simon J E Taylor is a Reader and leads the Modelling & Simulation Group in the Department of Computer Science. He is a founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Simulation and founded and chairs the COTS Simulation Package Interoperability Standards Group under the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO). He chaired ACM SIGSIM between 2005-2008 and is a member of the ACM SIGSIM Steering Committee. He is the series editor of the OR Essential Series published by Palgrave-Macmillan. He co-founded the UK ORS Simulation Workshop Series and is a member of the Steering Committee. According to Microsoft Academic, Dr Taylor is a top 100 scientist in Computer Science/Simulation (top 5 UK). His work has led to major cost savings in industry. He reviews regularly for international conferences and journals. He is the Modeling Methodology Track Chair of the 2014 IEEE/ACM Winter Simulation Conference and Chair of the 2015 ACM Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation. Recently he was keynote speaker at the 2014 SCS SpringSim conference and the 2014 UK ORS Conference. Website
	Tolk, Andreas The Mitre Corporation Dr. Tolk received his Ph.D. in Computer Science (1995) and has a M.S. in Computer Science (1988) from the University of the Federal Armed Forces, Germany. Dr. Tolk is a specialist in engineering management and systems engineering. His research focuses on model-based systems engineering, which includes research on modeling and simulation interoperability challenges, in particular in the context of complex systems and systems of systems. In 2016, Dr. Tolk was named Fellow of the Society for Modeling & Simulation.
	Troitzsch, Klaus University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany Professor Troitzsch's primary academic interest is social science methodology, especially, modeling and simulation in the social sciences. He was a founder of the Research Committee on Modeling and Simulation of the German Sociological Association and served it as chair and vice-chair for nearly a decade. Professor Troitzsch was also a founder of the SimSoc Consortium which organizes conferences in social simulation and publishes the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS, now in its eighth year), of which he is the Forum Editor. He was also among the signatories of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and acts as its treasurer and webmaster. His research projects include the MIMOSE project (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft between 1988 and 1992) which has developed a simulation tool for micro and multilevel simulation. From 1996 to 2002 he was involved in an international project (funded by the European Union in its TACIS/TEMPUS program) devoted to implement online simulation andsocial science courses (together with Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey, Guildford, England, and Serge Chernyshenko, Dnipropetrovs'k National University, Dnipropetrovs'k, Ukraine). During this program professor Troitzsch organized a series of summer schools in social science methodology and social simulation for international participants. From 2000 to 2003 he was also involved in an EU Fifth Framework funded international research project: Freshwater Integrated Resources Management with Agents (FIRMA) where his team was, responsible for the simulation aspects. He was also involved in another TEMPUS/TACIS project with partners in Russia, Ukraine, Spain, Italy, Slovakia and Germany devoted to fostering System Modernization of University Management. Troitzsch was also involved in a Leonardo da Vinci project promoting the introduction of simulation into Latvian study programs. He was also at the core of a DFG funded project devoted to analyzing traffic route decisions and in a microsimulation project which analyzed mating and marriage between the different ethnic groups in New Zealand. Currently he is involved in an EU Sixth Framework project called EMIL --- Emergence in the Loop, which is devoted to analyzing, modeling and simulating the processes by which norms emergence in social groups. In this project, his group is responsible for building the simulator and designing an agent architecture that allows agents to consider, adopt, discuss and defend norms. He is author, co-author, and co-editor of a number of books on simulation, author of a number of articles in social simulation, and has organized or co-organized a number of national and international conferences in social simulation. Website
	Voas, David University College London, UK David Voas was elected to a Simon Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester in 2003 and appointed to a chair in the Institute for Social Change in 2007. He previously held a lectureship at the University of Sheffield and a research post at the University of Liverpool, having returned to academic life in 1998 after a long period in the private sector. He has spent extended periods overseas, notably in Africa, India, France, the USA and Bulgaria. He is the national program director in Great Britain for the European Values Study and co-director of British Religion in Numbers, an online centre for British data on religion. He serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Sociologyand the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and on the council of the British Society for Population Studies. He spent Trinity term 2009 at Nuffield College, Oxford. Website
	White, Claire California State University, Northridge, USA Dr. White is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Northridge and joined the Religious Studies Department in 2012. She previously worked in Queen's University, Belfast, King's College, London and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge teaching religion and psychology from an interdisciplinary perspective. Promoting the scientific study of religion, Dr White is part of the cognitive science of religion movement. Dr. White earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science of Religion in 2008 at Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland. Website
	Whitehouse, Harvey University of Oxford, UK Professor Whitehouse is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the evolution of social complexity. One of the founders of the cognitive science of religion, he is well known for his theory of “modes of religiosity,” which explains how the frequency and emotional intensity of collective rituals influence the scale and structure of religious organizations. Website \| cv
	Xygalatas, Dimitris University of Connecticut, USA Dr. Xygalatas is anthropologist, amateur photographer, and compulsive traveller. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast. IHe has since held positions at the universities of Princeton, Aarhus, and Masaryk, where he served as Director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA). he currently holds a joint position between Aarhus University and the University of Connecticut, where he runs the Experimental Anthropology Lab. Website \| cv
	Zuckerman, Phil Pitzer College, USA Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He is also a regular affiliated professor at Claremont Graduate University, and he has been a guest professor for two years at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is also a Fellow of the Secular Global Institute. Website \| cv