Oleg Smirnov’s areas of expertise  and research interests include world politics, politics of climate change, cooperation, computational modeling (agent-based modeling, geographic information systems, evolutionary dynamics) and behavioral economics (altruistic punishment, collective risk social dilemmas). He is currently working on a computational model of social consequences of climate change, and recently published a paper that reveals climate change, not population growth, plays the main role in predicting population exposure to extreme droughts.