Systems Transitions Seminar Series

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU Stern. Haidt received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His mission is apply research in social and moral psychology to help important institutions work better.

Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org , ConstructiveDialogue.org , and EthicalSystems.org .

Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). He has written more than 100 academic articles. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s “Top 50 Thinkers.” He has given four TED talks.

Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He is currently writing Life After Babel: Adapting to a world we can no longer share.

Megan Stevenson is an economist and criminal justice scholar at the University of Virginia. She conducts empirical research in areas such as bail, algorithmic risk assessment, misdemeanors, sentencing and juvenile justice.

She was the inaugural winner of the Ephraim Prize given to an “early-career scholar in the field of law and economics whose work has advanced the state of knowledge in the field.” Stevenson was also the 2019 winner of the Oliver E. Williamson Prize for Best Article in the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization.

She publishes widely in law reviews such as the Stanford Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the University of Virginia Law Review, as well as economics journals such as the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Her research on bail was cited extensively in a landmark federal civil rights decision, O’Donnell v. Harris County, and has received widespread media coverage.

Her research has been profiled in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Wired Magazine, The Atlantic, Science Magazine, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Houston Chronicle, and many others. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association and is the chair of the Law and Economics section at AALS. Prior to joining the law faculty at UVA, Stevenson was an assistant professor of law at George Mason University and a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Quattrone Center. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Stuart Candy (@futuryst) is a Berggruen Fellow at the University of Southern California, Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and Associate Professor of Design and Director of Situation Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. A strategic designer, facilitator, artist and educator, he works with leaders and learners around the world to augment collective foresight capacity. As an educator he has introduced futures at leading design schools, and as a practitioner he has partnered with governments at all levels and organizations including United Nations agencies, Smithsonian Institution, the BBC, NASA JPL, Skoll World Forum, US Conference of Mayors, Oxford University, Dubai Museum of the Future, and Cook Inlet Tribal Council.

Dr. Candy holds degrees in Law and the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Melbourne, and an MA and PhD in Political Science (Alternative Futures) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was twice an East-West Center Fellow (Honolulu) and currently serves as Vice Chair of the Center for PostNatural History (Pittsburgh), and Special Advisor to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Geneva). He is coeditor of Design and Futures and cocreator of the award-winning imagination game The Thing From The Future.

Dr. Thomas Hale’s research explores how we can manage transnational problems effectively and fairly. He seeks to explain how political institutions evolve—or not—to face the challenges raised by globalization and interdependence, with a particular emphasis on environmental, economic, and health issues. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, a masters degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics, and an A.B. in public policy from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. A U.S. national, Hale has studied and worked in Argentina, China, and Europe. His books include Beyond Gridlock (Polity 2017), Between Interests and Law: The Politics of Transnational Commercial Disputes (Cambridge 2015), Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge 2014), and Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing when We Need It Most (Polity 2013). Hale leads the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker.

Josh Kerbel is a member of the research faculty at the National Intelligence University where he explores the increasingly complex security environment and the associated intelligence challenges. Prior to joining NIU, he held senior analytical positions at DIA, ODNI (including the NIC), the Navy staff, CIA, and ONI. His writings on the intersections of government (especially intelligence) and complexity have been published in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Studies in Intelligence, Slate, The National Interest, The Hill, War on the Rocks, Defense One, Parameters, and other outlets. Kerbel has degrees from the George Washington University and the London School of Economics as well as professional certifications from the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School. More recently he was a post-graduate fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oran Young is professor emeritus and co-director of the Program on Governance for Sustainable Development at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research focuses on theoretical issues relating to the roles social institutions play as elements of governance systems, with applications to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. He also does comparative research on environmental governance processes in China and the United States. He is the author or co-author of more than 30 books. His recent books include: Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene, and Grand Challenges of Global Governance: Global Order in Turbulent Times.

David Wallace-Wells is deputy editor of New York magazine, where he also writes frequently about climate change and the near future of science and technology. In July 2017 he published a cover story surveying the landscape of worst-case scenarios for global warming that became an immediate sensation, reaching millions of readers on its first day and, in less than a week, becoming the most-read story the magazine had ever published -and sparking an unprecedented debate, ongoing still today among scientists and journalists, about just how we should be thinking, and talking, about the planetary threat from climate change. His subsequent book, The Uninhabitable Earth, was named to the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2019, GQ’s Best Books of 2019, and was chosen as one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019. Formerly the deputy editor of The Paris Review and a National Fellow at the New America Foundation, Wallace-Wells is the co-host of the podcast 2038, which interrogates predictions about the next two decades.

Pedro “Joe” Greer is a physician and dean of the Roseman University College of Medicine, a new Las Vegas-based medical school reimagining medical education. Before joining Roseman, Greer developed a unique and pioneering educational program at Florida International University (FIU) to train medical students in addressing social determinants of health. He has received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009) and the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (1993).

Sandra D. Mitchell is an American philosopher of science and historian of ideas. She holds the position of distinguished professor in the department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of social science, and connections between the two. She is the author of Unsimple Truths, Science, Complexity and Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Brian Arthur is an economist credited with contributing to the development of the modern approach to increasing returns. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets. He is a member of the Founders Society of the Santa Fe Institute and in 1988 ran its first research program.

Rob Axtell is Professor at George Mason University where he advises Ph.D. students in Mason’s novel Computational Social Science Ph.D. degree program. He works at the intersection of economics and computer science while also working on policy problems from a computational perspective. His book with J. Epstein, “Growing Artificial Societies” (MIT Press) is an early statement of the use of agent-based modeling in the social sciences. His research has been published in “Science” and other general interest journals, in leading field journals (e.g., “American Economic Review,” “Economic Journal”), and in computer science conference proceedings (e.g., “Autonomous Agent and Multi-Agent Systems”). He is an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and Northwestern University’s Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). He earned a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Scott Page is the John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management at the University of Michigan, and an elected member (2011) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Scott’s work covers disciplines including economics, political science, computer science, management, physics, public health, geography, urban planning, engineering, and history. He has written five books including The Model Thinker: What you need to know to make data work for you; Complex Adaptive Social Systems (with John Miller); and, most recently, Diversity and Complexity, which explores the contributions of diversity within complex systems.