Victor V. Odouard is a student in PACM and the Levin Lab.

Two main thrusts animate Victor’s research.  The first is an impulse to integrate knowledge, to see how observations that seem different might be instances of the same process.  The second is an aspiration to understand how human society changes, not just so we can predict what might happen, but so we can actively change it.

It is in light of these stimuli that Victor’s eclectic set of interests (in math, evolution, ethics, et al.) makes sense.  Regarding the first motive, Victor studied math in his bachelor’s at Cornell because he thinks of it as a sort of formalized creativity; in specifying a mathematical definition of a process, we often see how it shares many qualities with other processes we might not have known were related.  And Victor has researched the evolution of cooperation because he believes that evolution by natural selection is a powerful abstract framework for understanding change in many systems, including in economies and political systems.  This begins to show why the first motive is not so divorced from the second: Victor believes that a set of mathematical lenses, including evolutionary theory, will prove very helpful in understanding societal change.  But even detailed, descriptive account of societal evolution will not tell us how to make society better.  For that, we need ethics — what does it even mean to be “better”?

Right now, Victor is working on (the long project of) bringing together these three components — mathematics, evolutionary theory, and ethics — to understand societal evolution.  What parallels might it have in the evolution of other systems?  And what interventions might make us better off?