Sander E. van der Leeuw

Director, School of Human Evolution and Social Change and Dean, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University.

An archaeologist and historian by training, Sander van der Leeuw did archaeological or anthropological fieldwork in Syria, Holland, France, Mexico and the Philippines. After teaching appointments at Leyden (1972-1976), Amsterdam (1976-1985), Cambridge (UK; 1985-1995) and Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne; 1995-2003) he is presently Professor at Arizona State University.

He has held visiting positions at the University of Michigan, the University of Reading (UK), Australian National University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Santa Fe Institute, and has lectured in many parts of the world.

Van der Leeuw’s core research theme is the study of the dynamics of societies and their environments, but he has also contributed to the reconstruction of ancient technologies, (ancient and modern) regional man-land relationships, GIS and modeling.

Since 1981, he has worked on applying Complex Systems Theory in various ways in all these domains. In particular, from 1992 to 1999, he coordinated a series of major research projects (ARCHAEOMEDES I and II) financed by the European Union in the area of (modern) socio-natural interactions and environmental problems, and in particular concerned with understanding and modeling the natural and anthropogenic causes of desertification, land degradation and land abandonment and their spatial manifestations, using the Complex Systems approach.

More recently, he has been studying the phenomenon of innovation. The ISCOM project (The Information Society as a Complex System, 2003-2006) investigated the relationship between innovation and urban dynamics. He is currently involved in applying Complex Systems approaches to the study of this phenomenon in the United States, and in particular in Phoenix. That project is funded by the Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation.

In July 2001, he was appointed Secretary-General of the French National Council for the Coordination of the Humanities and Social Sciences. This was followed by an appointment as Deputy Director for Social Sciences at the CNRS (2002-2003) and at the National Institute for the Sciences of the Universe, in charge of a program similar to the Long Term Ecological Research program in the US.

Since late 2003, he is Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University in the US, where he is Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, an interdisciplinary unit combining social science with environmental and sustainability concerns. As of July 1, 2010, he will simultaneously fill the position of Dean of ASU’s School of Sustainability.