Andrew Stier

Living in cities changes the way we behave and think; their surprisingly regular organization drives and constrains social interactions similarly across cultures and throughout history. Andrew’s research in Urban Psychology takes advantage of cities’ regularities to study human behavior and of the inner workings of large-scale complex systems. His recent research in Urban Psychology has focused on applying and extending the models of Urban Scaling Theory to understand diverse aspects of human psychology, including, psychological depression, implicit racial biases, and short-term attention. In addition, this research has led to new understanding of other aspects of human behavior in cities such as economic productivity and the spread of diseases.

At SFI, Andrew aims to use these models as a starting point to develop a theoretical framework that comprehensively explains emergent human behavior across scales, from individual brain function to entire urban areas. Some of the projects he expects to work on include integrating models of human mobility into the Urban Scaling framework, developing a better understanding of how top-down and bottom-up processes contribute to inequality in cities, and investigating the role of attentional processes in the emergence of cities’ social network structure.

Andrew holds a PhD in Integrative Neuroscience from the University of Chicago, a Masters in Psychology and a BA in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Chicago.