Simon DeDeo

Simon DeDeo is a Full Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He holds a PhD in Astrophysics from Princeton University, an MA from Cambridge University, and a BA from Harvard University. His research focuses on cultural evolution, social dynamics, and information theory, applying these frameworks to historical and contemporary phenomena like Wikipedia collaboration, French Revolution debates, and animal social hierarchies. He directs the Laboratory for Social Minds, which studies collective intelligence and cultural transitions.

Education: PhD in Astrophysical Sciences (Princeton, 2006), MA in Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics (Cambridge, 2001), BA in Astrophysics (Harvard, 2000). Postdoctoral fellowships include the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (2006–2009) and the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (2009).

Research interests include applying information theory to cultural evolution, analyzing large-scale social systems, and exploring the cognitive science of explanations. His work bridges disciplines such as computer science, sociology, and history, with a focus on synthetic, data-driven approaches to understanding human collective behavior.

Key awards include the Cozzarelli Prize (2018) for behavioral sciences research and the William S. Dietrich III Career Development Chair (2021). He has secured over $1.2M in external grants, including from the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, and Templeton Foundation.

Service roles include chairing CMU’s Social and Decision Sciences search committee, leading the Humanities at CMU initiative, and serving on editorial boards for journals like Cognitive Science and Journal of Cultural Analytics. He teaches advanced topics at summer schools and has supervised over 25 graduate researchers.

Lab activities include developing tools like SFIHMM for hidden Markov models and collaborating on projects like the Collaboratory Against Hate. His team’s work has been featured in Quanta Magazine, Nature, and the New York Times.