Valerii Chirkov initially studied Clinical Psychology and then pursued a master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. Prior to joining SCIoI, Valerii worked as a research assistant at the Social Intelligence Lab in Humboldt University of Berlin and later at the Center for Humans & Machines in the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. There, he focused on developing behavioral experiments, both online and in virtual reality. At SCIoI, Valerii is currently working on the synthetic aspect of the Project 51, “Navigating the explore-exploit trade-off in collective search”. In this project, he investigates how two collectives with differing goals engage in collective search and avoidance strategies.