Doctoral student in Computational Social Science, Department of Computational & Data Sciences, College of Science, George Mason University.
I build agent-based models and network analyses to study how culture, trust, and cooperation spread, and why they sometimes break down.
Shannon Left is a doctoral student in Computational Social Science at George Mason University, where she builds agent-based models of how trust, cooperation, and cultural norms spread through groups, and why they sometimes collapse.
She is especially interested in how culture changes when the boundaries between societies thin out. Globalization, social media, and artificial intelligence now move ideas between cultures faster than institutions can adapt, and the friction shows up where cultures meet: in how identity forms and fractures, whose authority people accept, and which shared norms hold or come apart. Her models simulate these dynamics so that policies can be tested against them before they reach real communities.
She came to research by an unusual route. Trained as a classical ballerina at the Kirov Academy of Ballet, she spent more than a decade in Los Angeles as an art director and production designer for television, film, and live events, including work for NBC, MTV, Disney, and Cirque du Soleil. She then earned a bachelor's degree in Cloud Computing and Management of Information Systems and a master's in Interdisciplinary Studies at GMU. She holds AWS, Azure, and CompTIA certifications and volunteers with Fairfax County's Community Emergency Response Team.
I'm interested in how norms and cooperation take hold in a group, and what makes them fall apart, especially now that social media moves ideas between cultures faster than ever.
Why does the same policy reversal look responsive to one group and unreliable to another? This agent-based model in NetLogo follows how stakeholders weigh a government sponsor's track record, shared values, and peer trust when it changes course, using cases from federal public health guidance, and how trust recovers, or doesn't, after it collapses.
Cohen, Y.L., Callahan, J., Left, S.C., Rothman, D.S. In Advances in Social Simulation (SSC 2025), Springer Proceedings in Complexity.
An agent-based model in NetLogo of how threat perception shapes cooperation in public goods games.
Read the paper (DOI) →A cultural evolutionary model, built in Python and NetLogo, of how audiences confer and revoke prestige.
A modified Barabási–Albert model of why high-reputation agents under-signal, validated against the Epinions signed trust network.
Conspiracy-theory diffusion on YouTube (NetworkX); an adaptation of Cederman's Geoism model of state formation; and The Double Engine of Cooperation, on intergroup competition and intragroup cohesion.
Before academia, I spent more than a decade in Los Angeles as a production designer, art director, and television producer, after early training as a classical ballerina at the Kirov Academy of Ballet.
Leading large teams of artists and craftspeople on film, television, live-entertainment, and branded projects gave me a close view of how people behave at scale and under pressure. That is the question I now study with models instead of sets.