I am Jordan Kemp, a postdoc at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford's Martin School. I research novel theories of social and biological organization by studying agent decision-making in noisy environments. By combining techniques from statistical physics, information theory, and cognitive psychology, I derive theories for agent learning and growth. I study how these behaviors aggregate at the population level to drive inequality and cooperation. I am working on questions such as:
- How does information inform decisions, adaptation, and grow in noisy environments?
- How does information determine inequality, social mobility, and the organization of groups?
- How are life-course strategies influence by the environment?
This exciting researchblends ideas from physics, machine learning, and behavioral psychology, and hopes to answer open questions from across the social sciences.
I completed my PhD in physics as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Chicago Department of Physics.
I studied in the Urban Science Lab under the advice of Luís Bettencourt and Arvind Murugan.
In the past, I have conducted experimental research in both quantum computing and simulation using neutral cold atoms with the Bernien Lab at UChicago,
and in gravitational wave detection with Rana Adhikari and the LIGO Group at Caltech
