By Corinna Elsenbroich & Petra Ahrweiler
The first piece on winners of the European Social Simulation Association’s Rosaria Conte Outstanding Contribution Award for Social Simulation.
“Gilbert, a former sociologist of science, has been one of the chief links in Britain between computer scientists and sociologists of science” [1, p. 294]
Nigel has always been and still is a sociologist – not only of science, but also of technology, innovation, methods and many other subfields of sociology with important contributions in theory, empirical research and sociological methods.
He has pioneered a range of sociological areas such as Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Secondary Analysis of Government Datasets, Access to Social Security Information, Social Simulation, and Complexity Methods of Policy Evaluation.
Collins is right, however, that Nigel is one of the chief links between sociologists and computer scientists in the UK and beyond. This earned him to be elected as the first practising social scientist elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1999). As the principal founding father of agent-based modelling as a method for the social sciences in Europe, he initiated, promoted and institutionalised a completely novel way of doing social sciences through the Centre for Research in Social Simulation (CRESS) at the University of Surrey, the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), founded Sociological Research Online (1993) and Social Research Update. Nigel has 100s of publications on all aspects of social simulation and seminal books like: Simulating societies: the computer simulation of social phenomena (Gilbert & Doran 1994), Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Phenomena (Gilbert & Conte 1995), Simulation for the Social Scientist (Gilbert &Troitzsch 2005), and Agent-based Models (Gilbert 2019). His entrepreneurial spirit and acumen resulted in over 25 large project grants (across the UK and Europe), often in close collaboration with policy and decision makers to ensure real life impact, a simulation platform on innovation networks called SKIN, and a spin off company CECAN Ltd, training practitioners in complexity methods and bringing their use to policy evaluation projects.
Nigel is a properly interdisciplinary person, turning to the sociology of scientific knowledge in his PhD under Michael Mulkay after graduating in Engineering from Cambridge’s Emmanuel College. He joined the Sociology Department at the University of Surrey in 1976 where he became professor of sociology in 1991. Nigel was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2016 for contributions to engineering and social sciences.
He was the second president of the European Social Simulation Association ESSA, the originator of the SIMSOC mailing list, launched and edited the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation from 1998-2014 and he was the first holder of the Rosaria Conte Outstanding Contribution Award for Social Simulation in 2016, an unanimous decision by the ESSA Management Committee.
Despite all of this, all these achievements and successes, Nigel is the most approachable, humble and kindest person you will ever meet. In any peril he is the person that will bring you a step forward when you need a helping hand. On asking him, after getting a CBE etc. what is the recognition that makes him most happy, he said, with the unique Nigel Gilbert twinkle in his eye, “my Rosaria Conte Award”.
References
Collins, H. (1995). Science studies and machine intelligence. In Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Revised Edition (pp. 286-301). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412990127
Gilbert, N., & Doran, R. (Eds.). (1994). Simulating societies: the computer simulation of social phenomena. Routledge.
Gilbert, N. & Conte, R. (1995) Artificial Societies: the computer simulation of social life. Routeledge. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/24305
Gilbert, N. (2019). Agent-based models. Sage Publications.
Gilbert, N., & Troitzsch, K. (2005). Simulation for the social scientist. Open University Press; 2nd edition.
Elsenbroich, C. & Ahrweiler, P. (2025) Nigel Gilbert. Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 3 Mar 2025. https://rofasss.org/2025/04/03/nigel-gilbert
© The authors under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) Licence (v4.0)
Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 