Dr. Saba Siddiki is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University and the director of the Center for Policy Design and Governance. She additionally co-directs the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative and Computational Institutional Science Lab with Christopher Frantz and Ute Brady. Her research focuses on policy design, collaborative policymaking, institutional theory and analysis, and regulatory implementation and compliance. She has worked extensively with the institutional grammar, applying it primarily to the study of public policy design. Topically, Siddiki’s work focuses primarily on environmental governance.
Dr. Christopher Frantz is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on understanding institutions as manifestations of social behaviors, such as norms, conventions, and legal rules, and how these can be modeled, encoded, and analyzed computationally. He co-developed the Institutional Grammar 2.0, which aims to make institutional analysis more rigorous, computationally tractable, and applicable across disciplines.
Dr. Ute Brady is a research assistant professor at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on integrating collective action theory, public policy, and political science using institutional analysis. She applies these approaches to complex challenges, including digital knowledge commons, biodiversity conservation, and local sustainability governance. She has made significant contributions to the evolution and application of the Institutional Grammar, particularly in environmental governance and treaty analysis.
Syracuse University
CISL Coordinator
University of California Davis
Dr. Seth Frey serves as Professor of Communication at the University of California Davis. He is a computational social scientist who studies commons governance institutions and other complex social systems. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of strategic behavior.
LMU Munich
Dr. Nir Kosti is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich. His research focuses on the growth of rules, particularly the interplay between legislation and regulation, and studying rules design using computational text analysis. He leverages institutional analysis to examine how rules are formulated, delegated, and revised in legal texts, and how these processes shape rules growth.
Syracuse University
King's College London
Dr. Matia Vannoni is an associate professor in public policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. His research focuses on the intersection between political economy and public policy, applying economic approaches and methods to issues and topics that are relevant to public policy (e.g., regulatory/legislative complexity, business and government relationships, policy evaluation and representation/transparency). His research investigates the causes and consequences of legislative complexity and seeks to bridge the gap between political economy and public policy/public administration.
Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna
Dr. Christian Kimmich is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna and teaches at Masaryk University Brno. His research focuses on institutional and resource economics and employs situational analysis, game theory, behavioral theory, and econometric methods in the field of natural resources and infrastructures. He is inspired and driven by the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, and aims to contribute to a systematic, formalized computational extension to Networks of Actions Situations and the Ecology of Games framework.
Western University
Dr. Atrisha Sarkar is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Western University. Her research focuses on human-centric multiagent systems, combining methods from empirical/behavioral game theory, software engineering, and human-AI interaction. Her lab leverages large language models and formal simulation frameworks to model human behavior. This research develops tools to study social, economic, and institutional dynamics through AI-based simulations to help design interventions in complex, societal-scale systems.
