Dr Edmond Awad
Senior Lecturer
Economics
Streatham Court
Rennes Drive
Exeter EX4 4PU
Edmond Awad is a Senior Lecturer (Tenured Assistant Professor) in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. He is also a Research Associate at the University of Oxford, and an Associate Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2023-2025) and a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT (2017-2019).
In 2016, Edmond led the design, development, and research of Moral Machine, a website that gathers human decisions on moral dilemmas faced by driverless cars. The website has been visited by over 10 million users, who contributed their judgements on 100 million dilemmas. Another website that Edmond co-created, called MyGoodness, collected judgments over 3 million charity dilemmas.
Edmond’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature, PNAS, and Nature Human Behaviour, and it has been covered in major media outlets including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Pais.
Nationality: Syrian / British
My research sits at the intersection of behavioural science, ethics, and artificial intelligence. I examine how people perceive, evaluate, and interact with automated systems and AI‑driven decision‑making, with a particular focus on moral judgement, trust, responsibility, and fairness. Drawing on methods from psychology, economics, and data science, I study how social norms and values shape human responses to emerging technologies in real‑world contexts.
Key interests include:
- Artificial intelligence ethics
- Computational ethics
- Computational social science
- Multi‑agent systems
- Argumentation
Qualifications:
Ph.D., M.Sc. (Khalifa University), M.Sc. (MIT), B.Sc. (Tishreen University).