Wander Jager
Wander Jager (1962) is a social scientist with a broad interdisciplinary interest in social complex phenomena and transition to a sustainable society. Being inspired by the work of John Holland on chaos and self-organisation in the 90’s, he has since then been working and teaching on the micro-macro interactions in various social systems. His PhD thesis “Modelling Consumer Behaviour” integrated key behavioural theories into a computer simulation of human population behaviour. A key theme in his work is studying the dynamics of human behaviour in environmental contexts. As such he has been organizing special issues on the The Human Actor in Ecological-Economic (Ecological Economics - 2001) and Social Simulation in Environmental Psychology (Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2017). Formalising behavioural theory and empirical data in agent-based simulations has been done in the Horizon 2020 project SMARTEES (https://local-social-innovation.eu) on social innovation in the energy sector. The insights in building realistically behaving artificial communities are being used in EU funded follow up projects (INCITE-DEM, PHOENIX, MOBI-TWIN). Other applications address the dynamics of migration and acculturation, opinion dynamics (Covid), littering and socio-ecological dynamics. In the EU Erasmus scheme he worked on ACTISS in developing on-line courses on social computation (https://actiss-edu.eu). He started the Groningen Center for Social Complexity in 2009.