Mirta Galesic is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Resident Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, and at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, UVM, as well as an Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with properties of the external environment to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. In one line of research, she investigates how apparent cognitive biases in social judgments emerge as a product of the interplay of well-adapted minds and the statistical structure of social environments. In another, she studies how collective performance depend on the interaction of group decision strategies and network structures. A third line of research investigates opinion dynamics in real-world societies using cognitively-enriched models from statistical physics. And, she studies how people understand and cope with uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions.