Diane Payne, an active, respected and valued member of the social simulation community, sadly passed away in early 2019. She was a member of the European Social Simulation Association’s Management Committee where she had a particular interest in education, and organized the 2017 Social Simulation Conference.

Diane was Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Sociology and Director of the Dynamics Lab for Computational Social Science at UCD’s Geary Institute for Public Policy. She was a passionate scholar and teacher who took the empirical orientation of the social sciences seriously. She lived up to the promise offered by this academic undertaking, pursuing highly innovative, data-driven analytical sociology. While at UCD, she developed one of the first undergraduate courses on Computational Social Science, and made links with industry and policy.

She was a great pioneer in the field, and we will miss her quiet guidance, sound judgement, and sense of fun.

You can read Diane Payne’s obituary in the Irish Times: Sociologist and campaigner for education rights (written with contributions by her colleagues Andreas Hess, Pablo Lucas, Anne Cleary and her husband Dimitris Karagiorgis)