This program is made possible through a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Organizers

Alexander Wendt

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).

Zheng (Joyce) Wang

Zheng Joyce Wang (Ph.D. in Communications & Cognitive Science, Indiana University-Bloomington, 2007) is a Professor in the School of Communication, Translational Data Analytics Institute, and Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Ohio State University. One of her research foci is to study how people process and use media. Another research focus is to understand contextual influences on decision, cognition, and communication by building new probabilistic and dynamic systems based upon quantum rather than classical probability theory. She is Associate Editor for Journal of Communication and for Computers in Human Behavior. Her research has been continuously supported by U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense in the past decade. She is named a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2021.

Michael Schnabel

Michael Schnabel is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He applies methods and ideas from theoretical physics and computational neuroscience to model collective decision-making and information processing in social systems. His current research topics include opinion formation and cognitive models of decision-making, as well as quantum-like models to describe seemingly irrational aspects in human decision making. He can be reached at michael.schnabel@vanderbilt.edu.