F. LeRon Shults is Chief Research Officer at 📝CulturePulse, where he leads the research program behind the company's modeling of beliefs, values, and social behavior. He is also a 🏷️#professor at the University of Agder in Norway and the founder and director of the 📝NORCE Center for Modeling Social Systems. Across these roles he sits at the intersection of theory and computation, bringing rigorous conceptual frameworks to systems that simulate how human groups think, believe, and act.
Shults holds dual doctorates from Princeton — one in theology, one in philosophy and psychology — and has built a body of work centered on modeling and simulation of religion and social systems. He is extraordinarily prolific, having held the record for the most single-year publications by a Norwegian academic, with his work cited roughly 2,000 times. That theoretical depth pairs directly with the computational modeling at CulturePulse: the theory tells the simulations what to represent, and the simulations test where the theory holds.
LeRon is the theory half of the work I do the engineering for — the philosophy-of-religion and social-theory counterweight that keeps the models honest. He's one of my closest and longest-running collaborators, and most of what's good about how CulturePulse models belief traces back to arguments we've had.