Andrea Baronchelli

I am a Professor of Complexity Science at City St George's, University of London, and a Research Associate at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies.

My research addresses a fundamental question: how do humans and artificial agents organise and coordinate in decentralised socio-technical systems? I investigate how we shape and are shaped by technologies such as blockchain, social media, and AI, and how this co-evolution is reshaping public debate, governance, and collective decision-making. My approach combines large-scale data analysis, mathematical modelling, and controlled experiments with human participants and AI agents.

My work has informed policy and public debate, with citations across ~100 policy documents. It has received wide media coverage and had real-world impact, including its use as an impact case in the latest UK national research assessment (REF). My research has been supported by organisations including UKRI, PayPal, ESRC, InnovateUK, and the UK Government.

In 2019, I received the Young Scientist Award for Socio and Econophysics from the German Physical Society. From 2019 to 2021, I led the Economic Data Science theme at The Alan Turing Institute, where I launched the Token Economy theme in 2021 and led it until 2025.

I regularly engage with public and policy audiences through op-eds, media commentary, and public speaking. I also provide strategic advice to governments, major technology firms, and start-ups on complex systems, network science, DeFi, and AI.

Selected publications:

How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy. Science (2026)
Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populations. Science Advances (2025)
Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countries. Nat. Comms (2024)
Shaping new norms for AI. Phil. Trans. of the Royal Soc. B (2024)
Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time. Nature (2024)
The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media. PNAS Nexus (2023)
Growing polarization around climate change on social media. Nature Climate Change (2022)
Macroscopic properties of buyer–seller networks in online marketplaces. PNAS Nexus (2022)
Central bank digital currencies risk becoming a digital Leviathan. Nature Human Behaviour (2022)
Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks and visual features. Scientific Reports (2021)
Experimental evidence for scale-induced category convergence across populations. Nature Communications (2021)
From code to market: Network of developers and correlated returns of cryptocurrencies. Science Advances (2020)
The emergence of consensus. Royal Society Open Science (2018)
The dynamics of norm change in the cultural evolution of language. PNAS (2018)
Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention. Science (2018)
Evidence for a conserved quantity in human mobility. Nature Human Behaviour (2018)
Evolutionary dynamics of the cryptocurrency market. RSOS (2017)
The spontaneous emergence of conventions: An experimental study of cultural evolution. PNAS (2015)
Networks in Cognitive Science. Trends Cog. Sci. (2013)
Modeling human dynamics of face-to-face interaction networks. Phys. Rev. Lett. (2013)
Random Walks and Search in Time-Varying Networks. Phys. Rev. Lett. (2012)
Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns. PNAS (2010)
Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories. PNAS (2008)
Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems. J. Stat. Mech. P06014 (2006)