Edward has worked as Principle Research Assistant for the Seshat Databank project and a Senior Research Assistant at the University of Hertfordshire in England. Other recent projects included research for "War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies," an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with Peter Turchin, Tom Currie and Sergey Gavrilets, a data sample on 19th Century travel routes for Pieter Francois's Sample Generator project with British Library Labs, and a report for the journal Cliodynamics.
He has been interested in evolutionary science within social-science (he has a Masters in International Politics at University of Wales, Aberystwyth and a Bachelors degree in the same subject from University of Portsmouth) since the turn of the millennium, when the word "meme" was an academic buzzword fostered by Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" and Aaron Lynch's "Thought Contagion" (but had yet to reach the heights of "orly owls" and rick rolling).
However, Edward has a broad interest in any data-lead approach to social science that includes, but is not limited to, evolutionary theory and is currently interested in, among other things, the role historical trade routes, and the process of trade, may have played in state formation. On the SESHAT project his main focus are social complexity and warfare variables.