Mirta Galesic

Mirta Galesic is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Resident Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna, where she co-leads the Collective Minds research group. She is also External Faculty at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, and an Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam. Her work bridges cognitive science, social psychology, and complexity science to understand how individuals and groups adapt to complex societal challenges.

Her research focuses on collective adaptation, belief dynamics, social learning, and opinion formation. She develops empirically grounded computational models to study how cognitive mechanisms interact with social environments to generate complex social phenomena. Her interests include how people perceive and respond to uncertainty, how collectives solve problems, and how network structures evolve in response to changing problems.

The 15 most recent publications reveal a strong trend toward integrative, interdisciplinary frameworks. They combine cognitive models with network science and data-driven analysis to explore belief change, social sampling, hate speech dynamics, and collective intelligence. A central theme is the wisdom of the crowd and its limitations, especially in polarized or complex information environments. Her work increasingly applies formal modeling to real-world issues such as election forecasting, science communication, and algorithmic fairness.

• ERC Advanced Grant (2024), €3 million over 5 years

Mirta Galesic has received major research funding, most notably the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant in 2024, which supports her project on collective adaptation. She collaborates extensively across institutions, including the Santa Fe Institute, Max Planck Institute, and University of Potsdam. While no formal students are listed, she leads and mentors researchers within the Collective Minds group at CSH. She has been involved in organizing major events such as NetSci 2023 and CSH Winter Schools, contributing to training and community building in network and complexity sciences.

She is a key figure in the Collective Minds research group at the Complexity Science Hub, which investigates how cognitive and social mechanisms give rise to collective behavior. The group uses experimental, survey, and computational methods to study belief dynamics, social influence, and adaptive problem-solving in teams and societies. Her work is highly collaborative, involving interdisciplinary teams from physics, computer science, psychology, and sociology.