Research interests
Social evolution
Evolutionary game theory
Evolutionary ecology
Cultural evolution
Biography
Jorge Peña is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the Toulouse School of Economics and a member of the IAST board. His research focuses on the evolution of cooperation from a theoretical and interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of biology and economics. His work has been published in interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Nature Communications) and specialized journals across disciplines, including The American Naturalist, Evolution, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Mathematical Economics, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Physical Review E, PLOS Computational Biology, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Originally trained as an engineer, he received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lausanne and has previously held postdoctoral research positions at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Basel, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. During his leave (2022-2023), he was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam and a guest researcher at the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.