Speakers – 2021

(alphabetically) 

Michel Bitbol, École Normale Supérieure, France
Research Interests: Philosophy of mind and consciousness, Epistemology, Philosophy of modern physics, History of physics in the twentieth century, Philosophy of science
Michel Bitbol is emeritus researcher at CNRS/École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. He received a M.D., a Ph.D. in physics and a “Habilitation” in philosophy. After a start in scientific research, he turned to philosophy of science, editing texts by Erwin Schrödinger and formulating a philosophy of quantum mechanics based on phenomenological and neo-kantian conceptions. He then studied the relations between physics and the philosophy of mind, as well as a first-person conception of consciousness arising from an experience of the phenomenological Epoché. More recently, he engaged a debate with the philosophical movement called “speculative realism”, from the same standpoint. Read more.

Peter Bruza, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Queensland, Australia
Research Interests: Quantum cognition, Contextuality and context-sensitivity in probabilistic models of cognition, Information retrieval, cognitive science, applied logic.
Peter Bruza is a Professor of Information Systems at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His research spans cognitive science, non-classical logic and information retrieval. His current research interest lies in the field of Quantum Cognition, which aims to develop new insights into human cognition using the conceptual framework and formalism of quantum theory. Read more.

Jerome Busemeyer, Department of Psychological Sciences, Indiana University, USA
Research Interests: Mathematical models of learning and human decision making, decision field theory, quantum cognition.
Jerome Busemeyer previously was a Full Professor at Purdue University before 1997, and now is Distinguished Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Science, and Statistics at Indiana University-Bloomington. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health, and he served grant review panels for these agencies. He was the Manager of the Cognition and Decision Program at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2005-2007. He has published five books in decision and cognition, and over 100 journal articles across disciplines. He served as the Chief Editor of Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Associate Editor of Psychological Review, and he was the founding Chief Editor of Decision. He is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and he won the prestigious Warren medal from that society in 2015. He became a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. During his early career, he became well known for the development of a dynamic and stochastic model of human decision making called decision field theory. Later, he was one of the pioneers to develop a new approach to cognition based on principles from quantum theory.  In 2012, Cambridge University Press published his book with Peter Bruza introducing this new theory applying quantum probability to model human judgment and decision-making. Read more.

Karin Fierke, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, Scotland
Research Interests: Quantum ethics
K.M. Fierke is Professor of International Relations in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. She is the author of Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations (2012), which was winner of the Sussex International Theory Prize 2014; Critical Approaches to International Security (2007, 2015); Diplomatic Interventions: Conflict and Change in a Globalising World (2005); Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigations in Security (1998),  co-editor of Constructing International Relations: The Next Generation (2001) and editor of a special issue of Global Constitutionalism (2017), Independence in a World of Intersecting Legal and Political Regimes. She has published widely on topics relating to constructivism and international security as well as emotions, trauma and political violence. Fierke’s work on quantum theory includes articles in Critical Review (2017), International Studies Review (2019) and Security Dialogue (2020). In 2019 she received a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to explore the parallel drawn by quantum physicists to Eastern philosophies, such as Daoism and Buddhism, as a point of departure for understanding the macroscopic implications of quantum theory. The resulting book is provisionally titled Mind, Action and Strategy in an Uncertain World: Snapshots from Home. She is also engaged in a project with a therapeutic practitioner, Nicola Mackay, which is funded by the Human Family Unity Foundation. ‘Mapping the Empire: The Contemporary Legacy of Historical Trauma and Dislocation’ is a year-long experiment exploring the impact of entanglements of traumatic collective memory on contemporary politics. Read more.

Liane Gabora, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada
Research Interests: Evolution of human cognition, creativity, comparative study of evolutionary processes (biological and cultural); modeling the contextual nature of concept interactions by means of a quantum formalism.
Liane Gabora is an interdisciplinary psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on how culture evolves, how the creative process works—with an emphasis on concept combination and cross-domain thinking—-and how it fuels the evolution of culture. She also studies the different ways in which evolutionary processes work, with the aim of developing a generalized evolutionary framework that encompasses the origin of life, biological evolution, and cultural evolution. Her Ph.D. thesis was the first publication to introduce a quantum formalism for modeling the contextual nature of concept interactions, and she is the first author (with her Ph.D. supervisor, Diederik Aerts) of the first paper on this topic. She was the first to develop a computational model of cumulative cultural evolution, to develop an autocatalytic framework to explain the integrated nature of human cognition, and to explain creative insight at the level of neural cell assemblies. Over the last two decades, further developments of these ideas, both theoretical and empirical, has led to the Self-Other Reorganization (SOR) theory of cultural evolution, and a theory of creativity–honing theory–that synthesizes research on complex systems, associative memory, and formal models of concept combination. She has over 200 scholarly publications in diverse journals that span psychology (e.g., Psychonomic Bulletin & Review), cognitive science (e.g., Cognitive Science), biology (e.g., Journal of Theoretical Biology), computer science (e.g., Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence), physics (e.g., Foundations of Physics), mathematics (e.g., Journal of Mathematical Psychology), anthroplogy (e.g., Current Anthropology), archaeology (e.g., World Archaeology), and interdisciplinary reserach (e.g., Journal of the Royal Society Interface), as well as literary journals (e.g., Fiction). She has given lectures worldwide. She is a published fiction writer, and composes music.

Shohini Ghose, Physics & Computer Science, NSERC Chair for Women in Science & Engineering, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Research Interests: Quantum information science,  quantum entanglement, initiatives to explore and address gender issues and diversity in science.
Shohini Ghose is a Professor of Physics and Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University and holds the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering. She is a theoretical physicist who examines how the laws of quantum physics can be harnessed to transform computation and communication. She and her colleagues first demonstrated a connection between chaos theory and quantum entanglement. Dr. Ghose is an advocate for women scientists as the founding Director of the Laurier Centre for Women in Science and as the President (2019-20) of the Canadian Association of Physicists. She is the recipient of several awards including a TED Senior Fellowship in 2018.  In 2017, she was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and she was among 25 women scientists from around the world featured in a 2019 UNESCO exhibit in Paris. Read more.

Peter Katzenstein, Department of Government, Cornell University, USA
Research Interests: Politics of civilizations and regions in world politics, power, and German and European politics.
Peter Katzenstein’s research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and comparative politics. His work addresses issues of political economy, security and culture in world politics. His current research interests focus on the politics of civilizations and regions in world politics, power, and German and European politics. In 2020 he was named the 26th recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize. Read more.

David Orrell, Independent scholar, Toronto, Canada
Research Interests: Quantum Economics and Finance
David Orrell is an applied mathematician and writer. He is the author of many books on science and economics including Quantum Economics, and Quantum Economics and Finance: An Applied Mathematics Introduction. Related research articles include “A quantum theory of money and value” (Economic Thought), “A quantum model of supply and demand” (Physica A), “A quantum walk model of financial options” (Wilmott), and “The value of value: A quantum approach to economics, security and international relations” (Security Dialogue). Read more.

Mark Salter, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada
Research Interests: International Relations Theory, Security Studies, International Political Sociology.
Mark B. Salter Ph.D is full professor at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa and Editor-in-Chief of Security Dialogue. In  2008, he was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Wolfson College, and Visiting Scholar at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge. In 2014, he received the Canadian Political Science Association Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2016, his edited volume Making Things International 1 won the International Studies Association Theory section prize for best edited volume. Salter’s research has focused on international politics in unexpected places, such as popular culture, passports and borders, airports, the Arctic, and more recent quantum theory. Read more.

Alexander Wendt, Ohio State University, USA
Research Interests: International relations theory, philosophy of social science, and quantum consciousness.
Alexander Wendt is Professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and taught at Yale University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Chicago before moving to OSU in 2004.  His research focuses on philosophical aspects of world politics, and he is well known in his field of international relations for several important articles and his 1999 book, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge UP), which won the International Studies Association’s award for “Best Book of the Decade” in 2006.  Wendt’s interests have since pivoted to the possibility of quantum consciousness and its implications for social science, on which he has published several papers as well as a 2015 book, Quantum Mind and Social Science (Cambridge). Read more.