After being the economic development officer for the Little/Salmon Carmacks First Nation, Tim used all his spare time trying to determine a practical understanding of the events he witnessed. This led him to complexity, specifically human emergent behaviour and the evolutionary prerequisites present in human society. These prerequisites predicted many of the apparently immutable ‘modern problems’ in society. First, he tried disseminating the knowledge in popular book form, but that failed – three times. He decided to obtain PhD to make his ‘voice’ louder. He chose sociology, poorly as it turns out as he was told his research had ‘no academic value whatsoever’. After being forced out of University, he taught himself agent-based modelling to demonstrate his ideas and published his first peer-reviewed paper without affiliation while working as a warehouse labourer. Subsequently, he managed to interest Steve Keen in his ideas and his second attempt at a PhD succeeded. His most recent work involves understanding the basic forces generated by trade in a complex system. He is most interested in how the empirically present evolutionary prerequisites impact market patterns.

SHIPENG SUN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, NY 10065. E-mail: shipeng.sun@hunter.cuny.edu.

Andrew Bell (Ph.D. 2010, Michigan) was a Research Fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. His current research portfolio focuses on the use of field instruments – such as discrete choice experiments, framed field experiments, randomized control trials – to inform behavior in agent-based models of coupled human-natural systems. Prior to this post, Andrew was a post-doctoral research fellow at The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he focused on developing applications for paleo-climate histories.

Andrew J. Collins, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering. He has a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Southampton, and his undergraduate degree in Mathematics was from the University of Oxford. He has published over 80 peer-review articles. He has been the Principal Investigator on projects funded to the amount of approximately $7 million. Dr. Collins has developed several research simulations including an award-winning investigation into the foreclosure contagion that incorporated social networks.