Pieter François is Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences at Regent’s Park College. At the Alan Turing Institute, he is the Academic Lead on Data Science and AI for the Arts and Humanities. He is a founding director of the Seshat: Global History Databank and is currently the project’s executive director. He works closely with the Social Complexity and Collapse Group at the CSH, led by Peter Turchin.

François has worked and published on subjects such as the evolution of social complexity, ritual, religious tolerance, warfare, and levels of inequality. A second strand of work focuses on methodologies for large-scale collaborative projects in the digital humanities. He is the Principal Investigator of Data/Culture: Building Sustainable Scholarly Communities around Arts and Humanities Datasets and Software—a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council—and of the Freedom of Religion or Belief Leadership Network.