Paul Smaldino

Paul Smaldino studies how behaviors emerge and evolve in response to social, cultural, and ecological pressures, and how those pressures can themselves evolve. He has broad interests in cultural evolution, cooperation, and social organization, as well as in the science and philosophy of science. He is committed to advancing both research and pedagogy in the use of mathematical and computational modeling to better understand social dynamics.

Smaldino is Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences and faculty in the Quantitative and Systems Biology graduate group at the University of California, Merced. His research is focused on social dynamics and cultural evolution, with emphases on cooperation, communication, social identity, and scientific institutions. He is a leading expert on mathematical and agent-based modeling of social behavior. A deeply interdisciplinary scientist, Smaldino received a B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University in 2002, an M.A. in Psychology from the New School for Social Research in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Psychobiology from the University of California, Davis in 2011. He held postdoctoral appointments at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and in the departments of Anthropology, Political Science, and Computer Science at UC Davis, before joining the faculty at UC Merced in 2016.