Carlos Gershenson, PhD

Dr. Gershenson is a tenured research professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has a broad variety of academic interests, including self-organizing systems, complexity, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, artificial societies, and philosophy. He is a tenured full-time research professor (investigador titular), leader of the Self-organizing Systems Lab, and was head (2012-2015) of the Computer Sciences Department of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is also a researcher associated to the Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3) of the UNAM.

Furthermore, he spent a sabbatical year (2015-2016) as a visiting professor at SENSEable City Lab, MIT, and at MOBS Lab in Northeastern.

He is an Editor-in-Chief of Complexity Digest.

Dr. Gershenson did a PhD on “Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems” at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels. His promoters were Francis Heylighen, Diederik Aerts, and Bart D’Hooghe. Afterwards, Dr. Gershenson did a postdoc at the New England Complex Systems Institute with Yaneer Bar-Yam.

Dr. Gershenson studied the MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems in the School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences (COGS) of the University of Sussex (2001-2002). The research thesis “A Comparison of Different Cognitive Paradigms Using Simple Animats in a Virtual Laboratory, with Implications to the Notion of Cognition” was supervised by Chris Thornton and Inman Harvey.

Before that, he studied a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering at the Fundación Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico City (1996-2001), and his thesis focused on “Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents”. His advisors were José Negrete Martínez, Pedro Pablo González Pérez, and Jaime Lagunez Otero.