Dr. Greg Wilson

Systems Ethnography and Qualitative Modelling Team, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Greg Wilson grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA. Since a young age he has been fascinated by language and problem solving. He went to College at Emory University and majored in Psychology. While at Emory, he worked with student publications as a writer and photographer, wanting to continue an involvement with using language to express interesting ideas. After college he worked for a year, and then enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in an MA program in Technical Communication. Greg then worked as a technical writer and editor in several research organizations (i.e., National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Institute, and Midwest Research Institute) and became interested in how scientists solve problems and communicate complex technical concepts. After a few years of working in technical communication, he decided that doing his own research would be more interesting than punctuating the sentences in other peoples' research. He entered a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric at New Mexico State University and wrote a dissertation on how scientists use language to change paradigms in their fields. He now works at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Systems Ethnography and Qualitative Modeling (SEQM) Team within the Statisical Sciences Group. The SEQM Team uses qualitative methods to characterize large and complex research problems so that quantitative methods can be brought to bear. His research focuses on interdisciplinary communication/problem solving, complex problem definition, and ethnography in technical settings.