James Evans is the Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology and Data Science at the University of Chicago, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. James’ research focuses on the complex, collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement, and the emerging role of artificial intelligences as critical agents within the knowledge system. He has a special focus on the nature and character of innovation. James builds novel observatories for human understanding and action through large-scale information modeling, adaptive experiments, and crowdsourcing. He uses generative modeling to explore collective knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field-methods, create alternatives to current discovery regimes, and grow complementary artificial intelligence to augment collective capacity. He directs Knowledge Lab and the Computational Social Science programs at Chicago.

James’ research has been published in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and top social science and computational outlets. It has been featured in leading media venues such as the New York Times, Economist, Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, Wired, NPR, BBC, El País, CNN, Le Monde, and many other outlets.

Before Chicago, James received my doctorate in Sociology from Stanford University, served as a research associate at Harvard Business School, started a private high school focused on project-based arts education, and completed a B. A. in Anthropology from Brigham Young University.