Social Science Matrix.

Bill Hanks is the Director of Social Science Matrix, as well as a Professor of Anthropology, Affiliated Professor of Linguistics and Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology. His work lies at the intersection of Anthropology, Linguistics and History, with a specialization in Mayan languages and cultures. He has conducted extensive archival research on colonial Mexico and ethnographic fieldwork in Yucatan, Mexico.

Among Bill’s books and many articles are Referential Practice, Language and Lived Space among the Maya (Chicago, 1990), a study of ordinary practices of referring in Yucatec Maya, Language and Communicative Practices (Westview, 1996), which outlines a synthetic approach to language as social practice, and Converting Words, Maya in the Age of the Age of the Cross (University of California Press, 2010), a study of the colonial formation of modern Maya, and winner of the Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Bill is currently working on translation theory and co-directs research groups in Paris and Tokyo.

A former Guggenheim fellow, Bill chaired the Board of University Publications at Chicago for three years, the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley for five years and served for eight years on the Scientific Board of the Fyssen Foundation, Paris. He has taught and lectured in France, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Finland, Mexico and Japan. He received his B.S. in French from the School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown (1975), the M.A. in Linguistics (1978) and Joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology at Chicago (1983). He remained on the faculty of both departments at Chicago through Full Professor in 1996, when he took up the Milton H. Wilson Chair in the Humanities at Northwestern. He joined Berkeley in 2000 and taught at University of Texas, Austin 2009-2010. Bill is a member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France.

Nils Gilman is the Executive Director of Social Science Matrix. He holds an B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Nils’s first scholarly interest was in American and European intellectual history, with a particular focus on the institutional development of the social sciences, the lateral transfer and translation of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, and the impact of social scientific ideas on politics and policy.

Nils is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), the co-editor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (Continuum Press, 2011), as well as the founding Co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. He also blogs and tweets.

Prior to joining Social Science Matrix in September 2013, Nils Gilman was Research Director at Monitor 360, a San Francisco consultancy that addresses complex, cross-disciplinary global strategic challenges for governments, multinational businesses, and NGOs. He has also worked at a variety of enterprise software companies, including Salesforce.com, BEA Systems, and Plumtree Software. Nils has taught and lectured at a wide variety of venues, from the Harvard University, Columbia University, and National Defense University, to PopTech, the European Futurists Conference, and the Long Now Foundation.

Bob Barde is the Manager of the Experimental Social Sciences Laboratory (aka Xlab) and Executive Director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging. He holds an M.A. in Political Economy from the University of Toronto.

Cathryn Carson is Associate Professor of History, specializing in history of physics. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and her B.A. from University of Chicago.

Professor of History Carla Hesse is a prize-winning scholar with 20 years of experience teaching at Berkeley. She holds the Peder Sather Chair in the Department of History, and in 2007 won the prestigious Aby Warburg Prize. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University and her B.A. from UC Santa Cruz.