Wesley Wildman

Wesley J. Wildman (born 1961) is a contemporary Australian-American philosopher, theologian, ethicist, and computational social scientist. He is dually appointed as a full professor at Boston University, in the School of Theology and in the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences (where he is a Inaugural Duan Family Faculty Fellow). He is founding co-editor of the journal ''Religion, Brain & Behavior'' (published by Taylor & Francis). A nonprofit entrepreneur since 2007, he is founder, past executive director, and current chief scientist at Just Horizons Alliance, which describes itself as "a nonprofit research and innovation platform that equips people and institutions to lead with clarity, courage, and compassion in moving humanity towards a more just and hopeful future."

As a philosopher of religion, Wildman's scholarly work has focused on interpreting religious and non-religious worldviews and lifeways, and building theories of beliefs, behaviors, and experiences that acknowledge value in longstanding religious wisdom traditions while attempting to remain intellectually viable in light of the biological, cognitive, evolutionary, physical, and social sciences. He is an important figure in the religion and science field, along with scholars such as Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and John Polkinghorne.

As a computational social scientist, Wildman’s research focuses on computational modeling of complex adaptive social systems, aiming both to deepen understanding of seeming intractable social problems (such as religious extremist violence) and to evaluate social policies designed to mitigate human suffering (with projects on rural suicide, exploitation of children in the commercial sex industry, dynamics of ideological polarization, patterns of religious change, cultivation of virtues among tech-immersed young people, and numerous other topics). He has also been a leader in digital ethics, helping Boston University develop ethical guidelines to address the increasingly prominent role of generative AI in education. Provided by Wikipedia