Sean Gourley's twin passions are physics (working on nanoscale blue-light lasers and self-assembled quantum nanowires) and politics (he once ran for a national elected office back home in New Zealand).

A Rhodes scholar, he's spent the past five years working at Oxford on complex adaptive systems and collective intelligent systems -- basically, using data to understand the nature of human conflict. As he puts it, "This research has taken me all over the world from the Pentagon, to the House of Lords, the United Nations and most recently to Iraq". Originally from New Zealand, he now lives in San Francisco, where he is the co-founder and CTO of Quid which is building a global intelligence platform. He's a 2009 TED Fellow.

In December 2009, Gourley and his team's research was published in the scientific journal Nature. He is co-founder and CTO of Quid.