I am interested in how people get along. Drawing on many fields including philosophy, psychology, economics, law, sociology, anthropology, biology, decision science, computer science, and complexity science, my research examines human tools for cooperation and conflict resolution, how we came to have these tools, and how these tools might be improved. I am particularly interested in social network analysis and digitally mediated mechanisms such as facilitation methodologies, argumentation visualization, negotiation technologies, and group decision support.
I have been in school all of my life. I studied philosophy and biology at the University of the South (B.A.) and then computer science at Tulane University. At Auburn University (M.B.A.), I studied decision sciences and information systems. I earned a Ph.D. in decision sciences at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University and along the way studied policy analysis and evaluation (M.P.A.) at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and law (J.D.) at the Georgia State University College of Law. In recent years, I've enjoyed short courses or summer schools at Harvard Law School, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University's Institute on Complex Systems and Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, MIT, Carnegie Mellon's Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems, Koblenz-Landau University, and the Santa Fe Institute. I am currently working on a certificate in PHP/SQL development in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I wear many hats. My current appointments include Faculty Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgia State University College of Law and Senior Director of Research and Principal Scientist at the Network for Collaborative Problem Solving (formerly the Interuniversity Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution). I am the founding director of the Computational Laboratory for Complex Adaptive Systems, affiliated faculty at the Experimental Economics Center at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and the Laboratory for Comparative Economics and Behavioral Studies (CEBUS) at Georgia State University's Language Research Center, and a regular visitor to the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. I also teach statistics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia.
I work with a lot of interesting people including Doug Yarn at Georgia State College of Law (evolutionary biology and conflict resolution), Ray Hagtvedt at the University of Alberta (social simulation, operations research, and networks), Sarah Brosnan at the Laboratory for Comparative Economics and Behavioral Studies (non-human primate social networks), Christoph Engel at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (voluntary provision of public goods), Glenda Eoyang at the Human Systems Dynamics Institute (chaos, complexity and organizational development), Howard Gadlin at the National Institutes of Health (modeling patterns of disputes as networks), David Cannon at Unboundary (designing cooperation), and Rob Schaefer at Hiddentrends (network-based digital collaboration tools).