Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science

SLU; Sweden; On-site; SEK 436,157 - 654,236; Full time

Job summary

SLU is seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science to join a novel research program at the intersection of AI, ecology, and political science. The role involves designing simulations to model societal processes and analyze policy outcomes.

Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant field, strong quantitative skills, and the ability to work with AI. Proficiency in Swedish is a plus. The position is for 24 months with a possibility of extension and is based at Grimsö or Uppsala.

Qualifications

• PhD must be completed by the start date.
• Structured analytical thinking about strategic behaviour.
• Comfortable working critically with AI outputs.
• Clarity and precision in writing across disciplines.
• Familiarity with simulation methods in social sciences.
• Understanding LLMs for simulating human behaviour.
• Knowledge of governance and institutional processes.
• Reading Swedish for political document analysis advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Design scenarios for negotiations on nature conservation.
• Define identity prompts and psychological profiles for agents.
• Analyze outcomes from Monte Carlo iterations.
• Co-author scientific publications on project findings.

Skills

Strong quantitative skills

Ability to reflect about strategic behaviour

Willingness to work with AI and LLMs

Strong writing skills

Experience with agent-based modelling

Understanding of institutional design

Reading proficiency in Swedish

Education

PhD in computational social science or related field

Tools

Monte Carlo simulations

AI-generated outputs

Behavioral signatures

Job description

Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science

Reference number SLU.ua.2026.2.5.1-1713

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.

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/) hosted at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and led by Guillaume Chapron. It is funded by grants from the Swedish Research Council (VR), the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra), and the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS).

Our goal is to build a novel methodology at the intersection of AI, ecology, political science, and complex system analysis that may change how policies are designed and stress‑tested and how governments prepare for crises. We are looking for an ambitious postdoctor to join this effort.

Tasks and duties

• 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 scenarios focusing on negotiations of nature conservation policies and socio‑ecological hybrid warfare.
• Agent persona construction. For each agent you will define the identity prompt, ideology vector, personality traits, decision mode weights (i.e. rational/emotional/social), and the affect parameters that govern when agents escape beyond their default moderation. This means extracting positions, rhetorical styles, strategic preferences, and psychological profiles from real‑world sources.
• Analysis and validation of simulation outputs. After Monte Carlo runs (e.g. 1,000+ iterations per scenario), you will analyze the distribution of outcomes: which policies emerge, where societal resilience breaks down, what chains of events lead to systemic failure. You will also design behavioural signature validation: verifying that simulated agents exhibit the expected sentiment, linguistic register, and action distributions when compared against empirical baselines.
• Publication and dissemination. You will co‑author scientific publications from the project. The research will produce papers at the intersection of computational social science, ecology, security studies, and AI, a space with very few competitors and high visibility.

Qualifications and experience

• A PhD in computational social science (or political science, psychology, behavioural economics, evolutionary anthropology or a related field) with strong quantitative skills. The PhD must be completed by the start date.
• Ability to reflect about strategic behaviour, political dynamics, or social processes in a structured, analytical way, whether through formal models, experiments or quantitative analysis.
• Willingness to work with AI and LLMs. You should be comfortable working critically with AI-generated outputs, interpreting how LLMs respond to instructions, and contributing to the design, testing, and refinement of prompts.
• Strong writing skills: clarity, precision, and the ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries.
• Experience with agent‑based modelling, game theory, simulation, or experimental methods in the social sciences.
• Experience with LLMs and their capabilities for simulating human behaviour such as the emerging literature on “silicon samples” and next‑generation social simulations.
• Understanding of institutional design, legislative procedures, or multi‑level governance (national, EU, international). The simulation enforces procedural constraints, and designing these correctly requires knowing how real institutions actually work.
• Reading proficiency in Swedish (relevant for analyzing Swedish political documents and media), not required but an advantage.

Assessment criteria

• Intellectual depth and originality. We are looking for someone who has demonstrated the ability to produce genuinely novel ideas, not incremental extensions of existing work. Your PhD thesis, publications, or research statement should show that you think independently and are drawn to hard, underexplored scientific problems.
• Interdisciplinary range. The ideal candidate is not easily captured by a single disciplinary label. If your work connects political behaviour, psychology, strategic interaction, and computational methods, even in an unconventional way, you are more interesting to us than a narrow specialist with a longer publication list.
• Fit with the project's ambition. This is a project that aims to pioneer a new field and we want someone who finds that proposition thrilling rather than risky. Your application should make clear why this project, not just why a postdoc. Because the research area is new, you also need to be able to work in relative isolation.
• Cross‑discipline disposition. You will work daily with questions from very different disciplines: computer science, AI, ecology, political science, geopolitics. The ability to communicate across disciplinary silos is essential. Interpersonal skills will form an important part of the assessment.

Location

The position is based either at Grimsö or at Uppsala, with a possibility to be partly based at another Swedish academic institution with a core expertise in computational social science.

Form of employment

Fixed‑term employment 24 months, with possibility of extension.

Scope

100%.

Application

Please submit your application before deadline 14 July 2026. The application should include:

• Statement of interest and motivation for applying to this position (max 3 pages).
• Resume including a complete publication list if any.
• Copies of diplomas.
• Copy of the doctoral thesis.
• Copy of a passport if the applicant is not a Swedish citizen.
• List of at least two reference persons and their contact information.
• Any work the candidate believes is relevant for the position.