Our own Prof. Paul Smaldino has been recognized twice by the Cultural Evolution Society’s ACE Course Design Awards, an international competition recognizing excellence in teaching cultural evolution.
Prof. Smaldino won the award for two of his UC Merced courses: COGS 174 (Cultural Evolution) and COGS 222 (Modeling Social Behavior). The award comes with a $4,000 prize and inclusion in the CES’s global library of open teaching materials, designed to help instructors around the world adopt and adapt high-quality cultural evolution curricula.
The award highlights Prof. Smaldino's efforts to build cultural evolution into the cognitive sciences curriculum—helping students connect theory, modeling, and empirical research in understanding how culture evolves and spreads. It comes soon after the publication of his book, Modeling Social Behavior (Princeton University Press), which offers a hands-on introduction to formal methods for studying social behavior and cultural evolution.
Congratulations to Prof. Smaldino for this well-deserved recognition and for continuing to put the Department of Cognitive & Information Sciences — and UC Merced more broadly — on the global map for innovative teaching and research in cultural evolution.
