Matthew A. Turner, PhD

Lecturer and Director of the Rigorous Understanding of Collective Adaptation (RUCA) Project

Current role

I am a Lecturer developing and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Computational Social Science for Sustainability and Agent-based Modeling in the Environmental Behavioral Sciences department in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. Before November, 2024, I was an inaugural Pandemic Preparedness Hub Postdoctoral Fellow.

Pursuing a rigorous understanding of collective adaptation

Climate disaster mitigation and pandemic preparedness need a science of collective adaptation to make wise policy. To meet this need, the rigorous understanding of collective adaptation (RUCA) project studies how populations of individuals collectively adapt to their social and physical environment through exploratory learning and innovation, social influence, and evolution. The RUCA project develops mechanistic models of how collective adaptation emerges from repeated social interactions within social networks and variable, uncertain environments. Computational mechanistic models allow us to analyze and predict the efficacy of candidate interventions for more sustainable ecologies and improved public health that would be impossible or unethical to test experimentally.

My blog collects RUCA-relevant research notes, thoughts, and tutorials. Please also see the select works below that outline my contributions to a rigorous understanding of collective adaptation, or my CV, to learn more.

Select works

Turner, M. A., Singleton, A. L., et al. (2023). Minority-group incubators and majority-group reservoirs support the diffusion of climate change adaptations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. [link]

Turner, M. A., Moya, C., Smaldino, P. E., & Jones, J. H. (2023). The form of uncertainty affects selection for social learning. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 5. [link]

Turner, M. A., & Smaldino, P. E. (2022). Mechanistic Modeling for the Masses - commentary on Yarkoni, “The generalizability crisis.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45(E33). [link]

Turner, M. A., & Smaldino, P. E. (2020). Stubborn extremism as a potential pathway to group polarization. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [link]

Turner, M. A., & Smaldino, P. E. (2018). Paths to Polarization: How Extreme Views, Miscommunication, and Random Chance Drive Opinion Dynamics. Complexity. [link]

Previous experience

I received my PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced. Before my PhD work, I received an MS in Applied Physics from Rice University and then worked professionally as a data engineer and lead research software developer in Moscow, Idaho.