2016–present
University of California, Merced
Faculty member; current Associate Professor, Management of Complex Systems.
About
Russ McBride
Associate professor researching AI, strategy, and entrepreneurship, with a foundation in cognitive science, social ontology, software, and venture creation.
Biography
Russ McBride is an Associate Professor in Management of Complex Systems at the University of California, Merced and Director of the Social Reality & Cognition Research Group.
His research examines artificial intelligence, strategic judgment, entrepreneurship, and the social-ontological foundations of economic action. He co-authored the seven Can Computers Think? argument maps—authoring Maps 1, 4, and 6—and is the author of “Mean Articulation Machines” in Strategy Science.
His entrepreneurship research investigates how actors create resources and new possibilities through strategically generative agreement structures: arrangements of rights, duties, permissions, authority, access, control, and participation. His background includes AI research and teaching, software entrepreneurship, university programming, and applied computational work.
Appointments and leadership
Scholarship connected to institution-building.
Academic leadership has centered on interdisciplinary research, entrepreneurship education, and the creation of practical environments for new ventures.
2022–present
Innovation & Design Entrepreneurship Hub
Director, UC Merced.
2016–present
Social Reality & Cognition Research Group
Director and interdisciplinary research-group founder.
2011–2016
University of Utah Foundry
Director, startup entrepreneurship incubator.
1995–1998
Lexington Institute
Artificial Intelligence Researcher.
Education
Philosophy, cognition, and symbolic systems
2009
Ph.D., Philosophy and Cognitive Science
University of California, Berkeley
Committee: John Searle, Hans Sluga, and George Lakoff
1994
A.M., Philosophy and Symbolic Systems
Stanford University
1990
B.A., Philosophy and Cognitive Science, with honors
University of California, Berkeley
Technical and entrepreneurial background
Applied work beyond the seminar room
Founder of Psyex Software & Consulting and former programmer in UC Berkeley Information Technology.
- Python for data analysis, research automation, and prototyping
- Bash and Zsh workflows
- Vue.js and Nuxt; prior Ruby development
- Local open-weight models and quantization
- LLM benchmarking, agents, and harness evaluation
- Dataset design, retrieval, and tool-using research systems
Beyond the work
A brief personal note
Climbing, diving, and demanding physical practice have remained durable counterweights to academic and computational work.
They stay here, on the About page—not as a brand metaphor, but as part of a life lived beyond screens and institutions.
