Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science

Department of Ecology

The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) is one of Northern Europe largest academic hubs for ecological research and offers a dynamic and excellent research environment with modern infrastructure. The Department of Ecology has about 150 employees, of whom around 40 work at the Grimsö Research Station in Bergslagen. Together, the SLU Ecology Centre and Grimsö Research Station conduct research on sustainable agriculture and forestry, plant protection, nature conservation, and wildlife management, and provide scientific knowledge to inform Sweden and Europe’s environmental policies.

About the position

Project

Can we foresee the outcomes of public policies, political choices and other decisions? We are finding out by developing serious games and running them using AI.

We are building large-scale simulations of societal processes (environmental negotiations, nature conservation policies, and hybrid-threat scenarios) in which every actor is an autonomous AI agent powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). These agents simulate real-world stakeholders, from government ministers to interest groups, and interact through natural language in complex strategic settings. We then run thousands of iterations to map the distribution of outcomes. This effort is part of a new research program Articulating Complexity ( https://www.slu.se/articulating-complexity/). We are looking for an ambitious post-doc to join this effort.

Tasks and duties

You are the person who makes the simulations meaningful. The technical infrastructure produces outputs in the form of thousands of LLM-generated texts from prompts. Your job is to ensure that these outputs are grounded in real human behavior, real political dynamics, and real institutional logic. Concretely this means:

Scenario architecture. Each simulation is defined by a scenario with an initial world state, a cast of agents, communication channels, institutional constraints, document corpora. You will design s