Modeling Behavioral Change in Socio-Environmental Systems

Dr. Jonathan Gilligan is Associate Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Alexander Heard Distinguished Service Professor at Vanderbilt University, where he directs Vanderbilt's Grand Challenge Initiative on Climate and Society. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Swarthmore College and his PhD in physics from Yale University. He was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a postdoctoral research associate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Environmental Research Laboratory. His research has been recognized with a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Group Achievement Award, a NOAA Outstanding Scientific Paper Award, and the 2017 Morrison Prize for the highest-impact paper of the year on sustainability law and policy. His book, Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change was named by Environmental Forum as one of the most important books on environmental policy of the last 50 years.

Dr. Marco Janssen is a Professor in the School of Sustainability and School of Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University. Marco is trained in Operations Research and Applied Mathematics, and his research interests relate to the study of governance of shared resources using computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and case study analysis. While his initial research focused on integrated assessment modeling of climate change, increasingly, Marco worked with social scientists to study human-environmental systems at different spatial and temporal scales. As a result, he has published in economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and interdisciplinary studies of social-ecological systems. Nowadays, his main interest is the study of the conditions of communities to self-govern their shared resources. His recent projects have focused on water management in Mexico City; participatory games to stimulate water savings in rural India; a comparative case study of lake organizations in Wisconsin, USA; agent-based modeling of hunter-gathers in the Middle Stone Age in South Africa; and online experiments to study collective action under high uncertainty in a virtual Mars colony.

Dr. Firouzeh Taghikhah is a Research Fellow at The Australian National University (2021– present) and a Young Resilient Fellow for Resilience Engineering community of the Four Technical Universities in the Netherlands. She is also a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney (2020–present). Firouzeh earned her PhD in Information Systems and Analytics (2021, University of Technology Sydney, Australia) and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering (2007–2014, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran). Firouzeh’s research interests are at the interface of computational/complex systems modeling, environmental science, social sciences, and engineering. Her research line focuses on developing innovative technologies (advanced analytical decision-making tools) to address socio-environmental issues and guide evidence-based policy making, with application to ecosystem services' resilience, renewable energy, and food security. Her work has been recognized by a number of top-tier journals (e.g., European Journal of Operations Research) and international awards and grants (e.g., theAustralian Association of Mathematics), mostly related to behavioral modeling.

Dr. Gilberto Montibeller is Professor of Management Science and Director of Professional and Executive Education at Loughborough University (UK) and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern California (USA). Gilberto is an expert in behavioral decision analysis and multi-criteria decision analysis. He is associate editor of the Informs Decision Analysis journal. He has published widely in decision sciences, authoring or co-authoring more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. The quality of his research has been recognized by best publications awards from the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society, the Society for Risk Analysis, and the International Society on Multi-Criteria Decision Making.

Gilberto's main areas of application are security decision analysis and health risk management, having led projects for the World Health Organization, Pan-American Health Organization, UK Department for Environment, Health and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), UK Department of Health, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and U.S. Agency for International Development, among others. The excellence of his decision analysis projects has been recognized by the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Practice Award and the EURO Excellence in Practice Award.

Gilberto has been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the London School of Economics (UK), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis ( Austria), and the French National Centre for Scientific Research's LAMSADE at Paris Dauphine University (France). 

Dr. Katherine Lacasse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rhode Island College. She is a social psychologist broadly interested in understanding human-risk perception, decision making, and behavior change. She conducts much of her work as part of interdisciplinary teams, working on integrating human behavioral feedbacks into the modeling of the climate and local ecological systems.