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I am a Professor of Complexity Science at City St George's, University of London, and a Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies.
My research addresses a fundamental question: how interacting agents, human and artificial, develop and inhabit shared realities. These are the cognitive, social, and economic structures through which groups coordinate, assign meaning, and create value. My approach combines large-scale data analysis, mathematical modelling, and controlled experiments with human participants and AI agents.
My work has informed policy and public debate, with citations across over 100 policy documents. It has received wide media coverage and had real-world impact, including its use as an impact case in the latest UK national research assessment (REF). My research has been supported by organisations including UKRI, PayPal, ESRC, InnovateUK, and the UK Government.
In 2019, I received the Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics from the German Physical Society. From 2019 to 2021, I led the Economic Data Science theme at The Alan Turing Institute, where I launched the Token Economy theme in 2021 and led it until 2025.
I regularly engage with public and policy audiences through op-eds, media commentary, and public speaking. I also provide strategic advice to governments, major technology firms, and start-ups on complex systems, network science, DeFi, and AI.
Selected Publications
Selected Publications
Group size effects and collective misalignment in LLM multi-agent systems. PNAS (2026)
How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy. Science (2026)
Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization. Nature Communications (in press, 2026)
Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations. Science Advances (2025)
Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time. Nature (2024)
Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countries. Nature Communications (2024)
Shaping new norms for AI. Phil. Trans. of the Royal Soc. B (2024)
Growing polarization around climate change on social media. Nature Climate Change (2022)
Central bank digital currencies risk becoming a digital Leviathan. Nature Human Behaviour (2022)
From Reddit to Wall Street: the role of committed minorities in financial collective action. Royal Society Open Science (2022)
Experimental evidence for scale-induced category convergence across populations. Nature Communications (2021)
Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks and visual features. Scientific Reports (2021)
From code to market: network of developers and correlated returns of cryptocurrencies. Science Advances (2020)
Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention. Science (2018)
The dynamics of norm change in the cultural evolution of language. PNAS (2018)
Evidence for a conserved quantity in human mobility. Nature Human Behaviour (2018)
The emergence of consensus: a primer. Royal Society Open Science (2018)
Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market. Royal Society Open Science (2017)
The spontaneous emergence of conventions: an experimental study of cultural evolution. PNAS (2015)
Networks in Cognitive Science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2013)
Modeling human dynamics of face-to-face interaction networks. Phys. Rev. Lett. (2013)
Random walks and search in time-varying networks. Phys. Rev. Lett. (2012)
Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns. PNAS (2010)
Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories. PNAS (2008)
Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems. J. Stat. Mech. (2006)
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