About Aaron Bramson
I completed my Ph.D. in a joint program with the departments of political science and philosophy at the University of Michigan (UM) in 2012. I also earned the graduate certificate in complex systems from the Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) at UM, and I would have just gotten my degree through CSCS, but they don't offer degrees yet. Before going to UM, I completed a Masters of Science degree in mathematics at Northeastern University in Boston. Before that I took graduate courses in economics at Boston University, mostly studying game theory. For undergrad I graduated from the University of Florida in 1999 with both a B.S. in Economics from the school of business administration and a B.A. in philosophy.
I have very broad substantive interests, and I am primarily focused on methodology. Methodology is about how do things correctly, and I am interested in lots of things, so I am very inclusive methodologically. I spend most of my time working on a solid foundation for complex systems research, and this includes a lot of work in agent-based modeling, network theory, game theory, differential equations, probability models, etc. Agent-based models are the newest of these, and therefore there is more work to be done. Specifically we lack established conventions for how to properly construct models and the tools to analyze them and understand what they are doing. This work is the most exciting to me and combines model building, non-parametric statistics, data mining, and data visualization. There is also a lot of conceptual work to be done, and I often evoke my philosophy training to address these issues.