Robert Axtell is a Professor at George Mason University, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, where he is Departmental Chair of the Department of Computational Social Science. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years.

Rob Axtell earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied computing, social science, and public policy. His teaching and research involves computational and mathematical modeling of social and economic processes.

Robert Axell's research has been at the intersection of the computational, social, behavioral, and economic sciences. He has worked on many public policy issues using computational multi-agent based models for a variety of market and non-market phenomena.

In "Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up", Epstein and Axtell wrote about the first large scale agent-based computational model, the Sugarscape, developed by Axtell, which they used to explore the role of social phenomenon such as seasonal migrations, pollution, sexual reproduction, combat, and transmission of disease and even culture.

His research has been published in the leading scientific journals.

http://www.css.gmu.edu/?q=node/27