Simon Garnier is an
Associate Professor in the Federated Department of Biology at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Rutgers-Newark. He obtained a PhD from the
University of Toulouse (France) under the direction of Dr. Guy Theraulaz and performed his postdoctoral work with
Professor Iain Couzin at Princeton University.
Simon is now the head of
the Swarm Lab (http://www.theswarmlab.com), an interdisciplinary
research lab that studies the mechanisms underlying Collective Behaviors and
Swarm Intelligence in natural and artificial systems. The Swarm Lab started to
operate in July 2012 and its research aims to reveal the detailed functioning
of collective intelligence in systems as diverse as ant colonies, human crowds
or robotic swarms. The Swarm Lab focuses in particular on the mechanisms of
information transfer and integration in large groups that can lead to adaptive
(or “intelligent”) collective responses to environmental challenges. Funding
for the Swarm Lab research comes from the National Science Foundation, the
James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Australian Research Council. Simon
Garnier was also recently awarded a 2019 DARPA Young
Faculty Award.