Victor Møller Poulsen has been a PhD candidate at the Complexity Science Hub since November 2024, where he conducts research on Belief Networks and Collective Adaptation as part of the ERC-funded “CollAdapt” project.

He received his bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science and Mathematics, and his master’s degree in Cognitive Science, both from Aarhus University, Denmark. For his master’s thesis, he used Bayesian models to investigate citation data and collected a large Twitter/X dataset to study the dynamics of discourse and social network structures within the reform psychology movement.

After graduation, he worked as a predoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Professor Simon DeDeo. A major project involved inferring the logic of religious beliefs and practices using cutting-edge machine learning approaches (e.g., “Inferring Cultural Landscapes with the Inverse Ising Model”). He also utilized large language models and modern sentence embeddings to explore possibility thinking (“Large Language Models in the Labyrinth: Possibility Spaces and Moral Constraints”).

Victor was a research consultant for the London School of Economics, working on the Database of Religious History (DRH). His responsibilities included research and database development (e.g., curation and publication of the first Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of Religion, and development and publication of the first Python package to programmatically access DRH data). His general research interests lay at the intersection of cognition, cultural evolution, social dynamics, and networks. His research mainly concerned the structure and constraints on beliefs and social practices, primarily using historical (religious) data.