Fellow Matthijs van Veelen appointed Professor Evolution & Behavior
Fellow Matthijs van Veelen (1972) has been appointed full professor Evolution & Behavior at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Amsterdam.
Matthijs main research theme is the evolution of altruism, fairness and morality. In his research he uses evolutionary game theory to mathematically describe strategic interactions. Matthijs developed a unified theory to explain the evolution of cooperation and altriusm that links the classic explanations from the field of theoretical biology and game theory. Since 2004, Matthijs works at the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED) of the University of Amsterdam.
About Matthijs van Veelen
Before he joined CREED, Matthijs studied econometrics at the VU University Amsterdam. His master’s thesis, called ‘Apples and Oranges’, was on comparisons of wealth, income and price levels across countries or across time. He switched to evolutionary game theory and in 2004 defended his PhD thesis ‘Survival of the Fair: modelling the evolution of altruism, fairness and morality’. TI fellow Gerard van der Laan supervised both his master’s and PhD theses. He received a VENI-grant from the NWO (the Netherlands Science Foundation), which allowed him to continue to drift towards the boundary with biology at CREED. Here he also benefitted from the regular interaction with Maus Sabelis and others at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED). In 2009, 2011 and 2013 he was a visiting researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) at Harvard University, in the United States. In 2012 he was elected member of De Jonge Akademie (The Young Academy), which is part of the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). Matthijs published in journals such as Econometrics, American Economic Review and Journal of Theoretical Biology.