Boston University is a private research 🏷️#university in Boston, Massachusetts, and the institutional home of the modeling-and-simulation research program in which Justin Lane held a postdoctoral fellowship. The university's work in the computational study of religion and culture was carried out in close affiliation with the 📝Center for Mind and Culture (CMAC), the Boston-based research institute behind the Modeling Religion Project.
From roughly 2015 to 2017, Justin Lane served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Modeling and Simulation within this orbit, building computational and agent-based models of religious and ethnic groups with a focus on stability, growth, and intergroup violence. The fellowship sat at the intersection of cognitive science, simulation, and the empirical study of religion, applying multi-agent and computational methods to questions of how social and religious groups form, persist, and destabilize.
My postdoctoral fellowship in modeling and simulation at Boston University was where I learned to turn theories of religion and culture into working computational models. I designed agent-based simulations of religious and ethnic groups, collaborated with programmers and subject-matter experts, and delivered against the requirements of a large, multi-disciplinary research effort.