A new center has been established at UT to promote connections and collaborations between researchers focused on human social behavior.
The Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity will combine system thinking, modeling tools, and big data to develop testable predictions and research into a variety of topics related to human social behavior, such as cooperation, conflict, cultural evolution and dynamics, mass behavior and psychology, and human origins.
Researchers also will focus on the emergence and evolution of human societies, impacts of social structure on disease transmission, social norms, and societal response to shocks.
The center is an outgrowth of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at UT. Researchers associated with the center will use theoretical and empirical methods and work at the intersection of mathematical, biological, social, and computational sciences.
Core faculty members will come from various UT departments including mathematics, ecology and evolutionary biology, anthropology, classics, political science, and psychology.
The center’s director is Sergey Gavrilets, the associate director for scientific activities at NIMBioS. He also is a UT professor of mathematics and of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Learn more about the center on the NIMBioS website.