Conflict is escalating across the world. Lives are lost, communities are displaced, and political instability and digital technologies are intensifying polarization and violence.
Preventing conflict and building peace has never been more urgent.
In February 2026, Behavioral Scientist and Neuropaz bring together leading researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and funders for a global online event exploring peace as a behavioral and scientific challenge. Neuropaz 2026 examines how human psychology, social norms, institutions, and technologies shape conflict—and how evidence-based insights can help societies move from division to cooperation.
Under the theme Hard Truths & Paths Forward, the event confronts the realities facing peacebuilding today: shrinking resources, incentive structures that reward outrage, and political systems that often prioritize power over peace. Through candid, cross-disciplinary conversations, Neuropaz 2026 aims to illuminate realistic, actionable paths forward.
Featured speakers include Nobel laureate James A. Robinson, Betsy Levy Paluck, Felipe De Brigard, the International Rescue Committee, Global Partners Governance, Semillas de Apego, Memoria & Perdón, and more.
Speakers
Evan Nesterak
Evan Nesterak is the editor-in-chief of Behavioral Scientist, an award-winning, nonprofit, digital and print magazine focused on exploring the world through the science of human behavior. Evan also serves as an editorial consultant and researcher, working with a number of authors on their book projects. Previously, he helped lead a multiyear project with the U.S. Soccer Federation and researched character development at the University of Pennsylvania. He also helped the Mayor's office in Philadelphia form a behavioral science advisory group.
Andrés Casas
Andrés Casas is a brain and behavioral scientist and the founder of Neuropaz. He is a lecturer at Universidad de Los Andes and the principal investigator for the World Values Survey in Colombia. He is a dual PhD researcher in neuroscience at Javeriana University and an Excellence Research Fellow at the Boris Mints Institute of Tel Aviv University.
Felipe De Brigard
Felipe De Brigard is a professor in the departments of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke University. He is the principal investigator of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory within the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Before Duke, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab and the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. from Tufts University. His latest book is Memory and Remembering.
Andrés Moya
Andrés is an associate professor of economics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He is also the director of Semillas de Apego, a community-based psychosocial program for caregivers of young children in communities affected by conflict and forced displacement, and commissioner for the 2024-2025 Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict, and Forced Displacement. His research focuses on understanding the consequences of conflict and forced displacement and how they thrust people into poverty through economic, psychological, and behavioral channels. He designs interventions to mitigate these consequences and foster movements out of poverty. He earned his Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Davis.
Greg Power
Greg Power is the founder and board chair of Global Partners Governance Practice (GPG). Previously a special adviser to U.K. Ministers Robin Cook and Peter Hain, he established GPG in 2005 and has since worked with politicians and ministers in more than sixty countries helping to strengthen political systems across Asia, the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe. He was awarded an OBE for services to the promotion of parliamentary democracy and political reform in the January 2023 New Year’s Honours. His book, Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics and How It Shapes Development, was published in 2024.
Oksana Myshlovska
Oksana Myshlovska is a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Bern. Her research is at the intersection of history, conflict and peace studies, memory studies, and social psychology. She focuses on memory and history politics, the role of socio-psychological factors, and the processes of conflict escalation and resolution in the Russia-Ukraine context. Previously, she held research and teaching positions at the University of St. Gallen, the Graduate Institute, and the Global Studies Institute in Geneva. She also worked at the World Economic Forum and the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance.
Josh Martin
Josh Martin is the director of the Peace Per Dollar initiative at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action, a new team dedicated to finding and promoting cost-effective solutions to violent conflict. He holds concurrent roles at UNICEF and Google in applied social science research and is a co-founder at the behavioral strategy advisory firm Venn Advisors. Previously, he established and led the international governance team at ideas42 as managing director, served as executive director of Beyond Conflict, and he has provided strategic advice and training to numerous UN entities in the peace and security pillar on leveraging behavioral science through his work with the Executive Office of the Secretary General and the Office of Counter Terrorism.
Nessa Kenny
Nessa Kenny is associate program director for the Peace & Recovery Program at Innovations for Poverty Action, where she leads two research grantmaking portfolios, one broadly on conflict, violence, and displacement, and one focused on displaced livelihoods. She works with civil society organizations, governments, and academics to ensure evidence informs policy and practice. Prior to joining IPA, Nessa worked with program implementers and UN agencies in research, program management, consulting, and fund development roles. She holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, a Master of International Security from Sciences Po.
Mareike Schomerus
Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara. Working on the intersection of social, political and behavioral science, she has published widely on violent conflict and international engagement, evidence-based policy and the mental models that shape it, and behavioral mechanisms in post-conflict recovery, for which she has developed a body of work on the “mental landscape.” She is the author of Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict, The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa, and, most recently, Research Design in Politics and International Relations (with Anouk S. Rigterink). Formerly, she was the director of programme politics and governance and research director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at ODI in London. She earned her Ph.D. from London School of Economics and Political Science.
Britt Titus
Britt Titus leads the behavioral science team at the International Rescue Committee’s Airbel Impact Lab, where her team applies behavioral insights to practical issues affecting humanitarian outcomes, including women's health, education in emergencies, nutrition, and mental health. She has over a decade of experience in the humanitarian sector, working in dozens of countries and previously worked at the United Nations World Food Program, the Behavioral Insights Team, and Nudge Lebanon. She has a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from the University of Oxford.
Helena Puig Larrauri
Helena Puig Larrauri is the co-founder and strategy lead at Build Up, where she focuses on integrating participatory methodologies into peace processes and analyzing digital conflict drivers. She is a peacebuilding and mediation professional with over a decade of experience advising and supporting UN agencies, multilateral organizations, and NGOs working in conflict contexts and polarized environments. Helena is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a Master's in Public Policy (Economics) from Princeton University.
Keynote Speakers
James Robinson
James Robinson is a University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research on political and economic development and on the relationships among political power, institutions, and prosperity. He is a fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and taught at a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022. His most recent book, co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, is The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty, which examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world.
Betsy Levy Paluck
Betsy Levy Paluck is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs of psychology and public and international affairs at Princeton University, where she is also the deputy director of the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy. Much of her work has focused on prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions in the Central and Horn of Africa and in the United States. In 2017, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Social Gravity.