Research Team

Professor of Humanities Computing at Aarhus University and founding Director of the Center for Humanities Computing (CHC), an internationally recognised hub for large-scale computational research across the humanities and social sciences.

As EC²’s Coordinator, he provides the managerial experience and institutional authority required to align a seventeen-partner, cross-disciplinary consortium. He also ensures access to CHC’s synthetic data pipelines, high-performance computing infrastructure (DeiC Interactive HPC), and expertise in the responsible use of large language models—a computational backbone underpinning EC²’s simulations.

Research and Executive Director of the European Institute of Science in Management (EISM). In collaboration with Dr. Eliahu Cohen, he proposed the project’s overarching scientific framework: a structural symmetry between quantum mechanics, quadratic voting, and democratic aggregation, formalised through the project’s collapsePreferences() operator and the concept of emergent altruism.

Working closely with the rest of the consortium’s partners and associated partners, he guides the cross-disciplinary research agenda through its quantum, classical, and social-choice workstreams. His primary research goal is to maintain the consortium’s intellectual through-line from first principles to real-world pilots in Aarhus (Denmark) and Basel (Switzerland).

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he heads the Quantum Engineering BSc programme.

A long-time collaborator of Yakir Aharonov on the Two-State Vector Formalism (TSVF), the theoretical framework underpinning the project’s dual-boundary approach to aggregation, he coordinates the team implementing EC²’s quantum voting circuits on IBM hardware and serves as the principal liaison between the project’s foundational physics and its practical social-choice applications.

Associate Professor at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies and a leading researcher in agent-based modelling for the social sciences, and co-author of the Santa Fe Institute’s standard reference on agent-based modelling in archaeology.

She leads the design and architecture of EC²’s simulation platform, authored the project’s foundational Specification Document, and ensures that its seven interlinked models—from individual agent dynamics to full-scale election simulations—meet the methodological standards of world-class computational social science.

Assistant Professor of Social Data Science at Constructor University Bremen and one of the field’s most cited researchers on opinion dynamics, bounded-confidence models, and polarisation.

His work on the conditions under which societies converge, fragment, or polarise provides the theoretical foundation for EC²’s voter-behaviour models. As Social Choice Lead, he guides the comparative evaluation of voting rules—from one-person-one-vote to quadratic voting and quantum-inspired aggregation—and ensures the project’s findings connect to the broader sociophysics literature.

Independent researcher with two doctorates, in theoretical physics from Stanford and in economics from Harvard. He is co-author, with Fields Medalist Michael Freedman and Glen Weyl, of a 2022 paper identifying the quadratic correspondence between the Born rule and quadratic funding.

Within EC², he serves as the conceptual bridge between the project’s quantum and economic workstreams, translating between the mathematical formalisms of physics and the incentive structures of mechanism design.

Postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University’s Center for Humanities Computing and maintainer of several widely used open-source tools for evaluating language models, including MTEB, DaCy, and ScandEval.

He designs and tests the large-language-model components of EC²’s synthetic populations, and is responsible for ensuring that the agents used in simulations reflect real linguistic and cultural diversity rather than the biases of any single model.

His evaluation infrastructure underpins the project’s claim that its simulations are independently verifiable.

Postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University’s Interacting Minds Centre, specialising in computational cognitive science, predictive coding, and Hierarchical Gaussian Filter modelling, and lead developer of the pyhgf library.

Within EC², he implements the Active Inference dynamics, grounded in Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, that govern how synthetic agents update beliefs, balance attraction and repulsion, and deliberate over time under different voting rules.

Professor at UCL’s Queen Square Institute of Neurology, one of the most highly cited neuroscientists, and originator of the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference—foundational frameworks for EC²’s agent dynamics.

As Chief Neuroscientist, he advises on the cognitive and variational-inference foundations of agent-level decision-making, ensuring that the synthetic citizens in EC²’s simulations are grounded in established theories of how real minds operate.

Distinguished Professor at Tufts University and Director of the Allen Discovery Center, internationally recognised for his work on bioelectric signalling, morphogenesis, and collective intelligence in biological systems.

His insights into how goals emerge across multiple scales of organisation—from cells to organisms to societies—inform EC²’s treatment of goal-directed behaviour and the attraction–repulsion dynamics that shape democratic aggregation.

J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University and author of the Constructal Law, which describes how finite-size flow systems evolve to provide increasingly easier access to their currents.

His work provides EC² with a thermodynamic and engineering grounding for the attraction–repulsion model used in its simulations, and independently converges on the same mathematical structure identified by the project’s quantum and cognitive frameworks.

Quantum information theorist with appointments at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Northeastern University, and co-author with Nicole Yunger Halpern of a 2017 Physical Review A paper showing that a quantum constitution can violate the classical form of Arrow’s impossibility theorem.

His work is a key theoretical input to EC²’s premise, and he advises the project on the interpretation of its quantum voting results.

Researcher in Eliahu Cohen’s group at the Faculty of Engineering and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and co-author of EC² Deliverable D3.1, Implementation and Analysis of Quantum Majority Rules under Noisy Conditions.

He contributes to translating abstract quantum voting protocols into circuits executable on IBM quantum hardware, and to analysing how measurement noise, decoherence, and gate errors affect the viability of quantum aggregation mechanisms.

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Engineering and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, with a PhD in quantum electronics from Imperial College London.

His research spans quantum foundations, the Keldysh non-equilibrium formalism, and time-symmetric interpretations of quantum mechanics—areas directly relevant to EC²’s dual-boundary formulation of democratic aggregation. He contributes to the theoretical consistency of the project’s quantum framework.

Researcher in the Faculty of Engineering and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and co-author of EC² Deliverable D3.1.

He contributes to the design and noise analysis of the quantum voting circuits that the project runs on IBM Fez and related hardware, helping establish the operational robustness of quantum aggregation under realistic conditions.

PhD researcher in the Faculty of Engineering and the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, with industry experience at NVIDIA.

Recipient of the 2024 Yoram Tal Quantum Excellence Award for work at the intersection of quantum information and attosecond science, and co-author of EC² Deliverable D3.1, Implementation and Analysis of Quantum Majority Rules under Noisy Conditions.

He contributes to the simulation, implementation, and empirical testing of EC²’s quantum majority-rule protocols, bringing both theoretical depth and hardware-level engineering experience to the project’s quantum workstream.

Simulation Engineer at HybridCore, Belgium, and co-author of EC² Deliverable D6.1, LLM Proof of Concept.

He leads the engineering of the project’s multi-agent simulation and visualization platform, translating specifications developed by the Aarhus team into production-grade software. The platform scales to 10,000 agents and integrates language models, Active Inference, and voting components into a unified runtime.

Senior Analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia and Assistant Professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, with expertise in statistical methodology and mathematical modelling for social science policy research.

Within EC², he translates the project’s scientific findings into concrete policy analysis for European institutions, ensuring that its recommendations are clear and actionable for Brussels-based decision-makers.

Founder of the Plurality Institute and RadicalxChange, researcher at Microsoft Research Special Projects, and co-originator—with Steven Lalley—of Quadratic Voting, the mechanism whose promise of increasing returns on public goods and emergent altruism underpins European City².

His work on quadratic mechanisms, plural technology, and the broader Plurality movement sets the intellectual agenda against which the project’s simulations and pilots are evaluated. As an associated partner, he advises the consortium on the theoretical development, operational deployment, and civic implications of the mechanisms EC² seeks to test and refine.

President of RadicalxChange, where he leads work on plurality, digital governance, and mechanism design at the intersection of technology and democracy.

He advises EC² on the real-world deployment of novel voting mechanisms and on the governance challenges that arise when quadratic-style rules interact with existing political institutions.

Quantum physicist at QuantumBasel and the University of Basel, with a PhD from Bristol and a research record in quantum thermodynamics and quantum information, including recent work on regulatory frameworks for the quantum computing industry.

Within EC², she leads the real-world pilot testing of voting rules emerging from the project’s simulations, translating theoretical and computational results into deployable experiments. Her combined expertise in quantum science and quantum-industry regulation positions her to guide the transition from simulation to real-world deployment.

At the City of Aarhus, Jakob Asmussen serves as the municipal lead for European City² and was an early supporter in bringing the project into a real municipal setting.

He coordinates the pilot testing of the voting rules and outcomes developed within EC², ensuring that the project’s theoretical and computational results are evaluated under real-world conditions. His work reflects samfundssind—the Danish ethic of community-mindedness and reciprocal civic responsibility—which aligns with the project’s focus on emergent altruism.

Consultant at the Municipality of Aarhus, working at the intersection of democracy, public governance, climate planning and digitalisation. Within EC², he contributes a local governance perspective, supporting the project’s focus on how democratic processes can be strengthened in real-world city contexts. His work connects electoral and deliberative democracy with practical citizen engagement, helping explore new ways for municipalities to involve citizens and build more sustainable, digitally forward democratic systems.

Postdoctoral researcher at the Social Resilience Lab at Aarhus University, specialising in computational social science, political behaviour, social networks, and agent-based modelling.

Within EC², he develops experimental and computational frameworks for studying how citizens form preferences, coordinate, and make collective decisions under different institutional systems. His work integrates social simulation, behavioural experiments, and computational social science approaches to examine how different political actors – ranging from citizens to political elites and media actors – dynamically interact and shape collective political outcomes.

Project Manager at ASM Research Solutions Strategy, specialising in the management, communication and dissemination of European research and innovation projects. Within EC², she leads dissemination and communication activities, supporting the visibility of the project and engagement with stakeholders across Europe. Her work focuses on translating complex scientific concepts into accessible content, managing digital communication channels, coordinating outreach activities, and strengthening collaboration between researchers, policymakers and the wider public.

Research Fellow in the Sociological Program at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia, with expertise in social marginalisation, peacebuilding, political-violence prevention, and communication for social change.

Formerly Associate Director of Operations of the Purdue Peace Project, Purdue University, where she led field initiatives in West Africa and Central America, she brings substantial experience in applied, impact-driven research.

Within European City², she connects the project’s findings with civil society organisations, marginalised communities, and policy audiences, ensuring that its insights translate into inclusive and actionable democratic innovation.