My name is Cody Moser. I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced and an Oskar Morgenstern Fellow through The Mercatus Center at George Mason University.I work on questions related to the evolution of human behavior and human institutions. To do this, I build agent-based models and perform large-scale corpus analysis of text and audio data. My research takes a broad approach to study the evolution of humans and the societies we live in. In recent years my research interests have pivoted to the difficult problem of modeling innovation. To this end, I have conducted research in three, broad, disparate regions:1. My current research is largely reflected in the fields of cultural evolution and organizational theory where I research innovation from a “collective intelligence” perspective. My main research questions here primarily relate to the structure of organizations and their lifespans where I ask: what are the processes leading to the evolution of organizational structure, how can organizations and groups of agents organize themselves to best leverage information in their environments, and what structures make institutions and groups vulnerable to collapse? I approach these questions primarily from an agent-based modeling and theoretical standpoint.2. A second branch of my research is situated in evolutionary psychology and langauge evolution from a bioacoustic and sensory ecology perspective. Here I have asked questions about the origins of language, proto-language, and music. My approach in this area has mostly involved large-scale corpus research of both acoustic and text-based datasets.3. Finally, I have an interest in the broad concept of “modularity” as it pertains to neural networks, collective intelligence, gene regulatory networks, and human mental adaptations. Here I take both a philosophical and a modeling approach to the problem, seeking to find generalities between questions of innovation, adaptation, and evolvability in these disparate systems.