Kees Zoethout is assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics & Business of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research interests involve self-organising social processes, group formation and work teams. He is especially interested in the relation between social and cognitive theories for describing the relation between individual and group behaviour.

He was co-organiser of the first ESSA conference in Groningen in 2003, finished his PhD entitled ‘Self-Organising Processes of Task Allocation’ in 2006 and wrote a number of papers on this topic. According to him the relevance of social simulation is best stated by Frank Herbert’s proposition that you cannot understand a process by bringing it to a stop.