Team

A full list of people who have contributed to the project can be found on the project info website’s who we are page.

This page intends to be a useful place to find out who is currently working on the project, how to get in touch with them and what they can help you with.

If you are new to the team, please add your details to the “Bios” section below. To do this follow the guide on how to update these docs. Follow the example of the existing bios, adding the following sections:

  • Who am I? A brief introduction to who you are.

  • What can I help with? A list of things you can help with.

  • Administrative privileges: This is your access level on seshat-db.com which should be one of the following:

    • Seshat Admin

    • Research Assistant

    • Seshat Expert

    • Public User

Note

Project roles that match the above access levels are defined here.

Contact

If you need to contact a member of the team, email them or use one of the communication channels listed below. Some team members have also added a bio to this page explaining what they can help with and their administrative privileges for the Seshat website.

Team Members

Name

Title

Email

Daniel Hoyer

Senior Research Associate

seshatghd@gmail.com

Daniel Kondor

Data Scientist

kondor@csh.ac.at

Ed Chalstrey

Research Data Scientist

echalstrey@turing.ac.uk

Enrico Cioni

Lead Research Assistant

enrico.a.cioni@gmail.com

Jakob Hauser

Research Assistant

jakob.e.hauser@protonmail.com

Jakob Zsambok

Research Assistant

jakob.zsa@gmail.com

Jenny Reddish

Lead Editor

reddish.jenny@gmail.com

Jim Bennett

Senior Data Scientist

bennett.jim@gmail.com

Kalle Westerling

Research Application Manager

kwesterling@turing.ac.uk

Majid Benam

Data Scientist

benam@csh.ac.at

Matilda Peruzzo

Postdoctoral Researcher

mperuzzo@turing.ac.uk

Peter Turchin

Chair of Board of Directors

turchin@cliotech.org

Pieter Francois

Executive Director

pieter.francois@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Samantha Holder

Lead Historical Researcher

samantha.louise.holder@gmail.com

Communication channels

  • Complexity Science Hub: e-mail

  • Alan Turing Institute: email or Slack. On the institute’s Slack workspace, request to join the #data-culture and #seshat-turing channels.

Bios

Ed Chalstrey

Who am I?

  • Research Software Engineer at the Alan Turing Institute

  • Working on the Seshat project from November 2023 until March 2025

What can I help with?

  • Seshat website codebase, in particular the maps pages

  • Seshat API Python package

  • Cliopatria shape dataset

  • Software Engineering & Data Science skills

Administrative privileges: Seshat Admin

Jenny Reddish

Who am I?

  • Lead Editor for Seshat

  • Working for the project since 2016

What can I help with?

  • Questions about polities, definitions of variables etc.

  • Responding to errors you spot in Seshat data

Administrative privileges: Researcher

Majid Benam

Who am I?

I am a Software Engineer and Web Developer at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, working on the Seshat project since January 2021.

What can I help with?

  • Seshat Website & Database

    • Maintain and improve the Seshat website and its codebase.

    • Assist with account creation, sign-in, and login issues.

    • Manage data entry and data extraction processes.

  • Technical Expertise

    • Software engineering and data science skills.

    • Design and optimization of database architectures and data structures.

    • Integration of new datasets into the Seshat database.

  • Support & Admin Role

    • Troubleshoot website issues or outages.

    • Serve as a Seshat Admin with administrative privileges.

Feel free to reach out if you need assistance. Email: benam@csh.ac.at

Administrative privileges: Seshat admin

Matilda Peruzzo

Who am I?

  • Research Data Scientist at the Alan Turing Institute

  • Working on the Seshat project from July 2024 until March 2025

What can I help with?

  • Analysis of Seshat data

  • Usage of API and SeshatDataAnalysis packages

  • Data Science skills

Administrative privileges: Researcher

Pieter Francois

Who am I?

  • Professor of Cultural Evolution, University of Oxford

  • Group Lead of AI & Digital Humanities for Resilient Societies, Alan Turing Institute

  • Founding and Executive Director of the Seshat Global History Databank

What can I help with?

  • Governance of Seshat

  • Engagement of historians with the Seshat Databank

  • Historical data

  • Setting up collaborations

  • Funding applications

  • Links with other projects

  • Use of Seshat Databank by the policy world

  • Setting new data gathering, analysis, and publication plans

Administrative privileges: Seshat admin

Peter Turchin

Who am I?

  • Chair, Board of Directors, the Seshat Global Databank

  • Project leader for Social Complexity and Collapse at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna

  • More info at https://peterturchin.com/about/

What can I help with?

  • Overall strategy of the Seshat Project

  • Collaborations with other research groups

  • Statistical analyses of the Seshat data

  • Building mechanism-based models to be tested with Seshat data

Administrative privileges: Seshat admin