Robert Axtell is a professor at George Mason University, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, where he is departmental chair of the Department of Computational Social Science.
[1] In the early 1990s, whilst still a graduate student, he met Joshua M. Epstein who was to become a key collaborator.
In Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up, Epstein and Axtell wrote about the first large scale agent-based computational model, the Sugarscape, developed by Axtell, which they used to explore the role of social phenomenon such as seasonal migrations, pollution, sexual reproduction, combat, and transmission of disease and even culture.
In 2007 Axtell left Brookings for his current post at George Mason University.
[4] Axtell is also a member of the steering committee of the Atalaya Institute, using agent based models to help provide evidence to influence social policy.