About Us

We are a research team whose center of gravity is at the Complexity Science Hub. We are constantly hosting students, research interns, and collaborators.

The Team

Eddie
  • Eddie Lee
  • ESPRIT Fellow
Niraj
  • Niraj Kushwaha
  • PhD Candidate
Gavin
  • Gavin Rees
  • Junior Research Scientist
Ernesto
  • Ernesto Ortega
  • Visiting Researcher
Shlok
  • Shlok Shah
  • Research intern
Clemens
  • Clemens Baldzuhn
  • Research intern

Alumni/visitors

Ernesto Ortega
CSH
2023-2024

Gavin Rees
ISTA
2022-2023

Evelyn McGonigle
Princeton
2023

Victor Odouard
SFI
2023

Simon Lindner
CSH Vienna
2023

Anna Eaton
Princeton
2022

Fabian Windbacher
TU Wien
2021-2022

Ashwin Sanil Kumar
Cambridge
2021

Alfian Tjandra
Harvard
2021

Eddie Lee

Eddie studies the role of information in the small and large living patterns around us. Examples range from the biology of neural tissue to the ecology of forests, the dynamics of armed conflict, and the processes of innovation and obsolescence in society. He is fascinated by how we paint those patterns on the shared canvas of mathematics and what the resulting similarities between the mathematical representations reveal about them. Do similarities reflect analogous function, universal dynamics, or are they (simply) artifacts of our representation? His work aims to answer these overarching questions that come together from the standpoint of information.

He is an Austrian Science Fund ESPRIT Fellow at the Complexity Science Hub and formerly a Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He has a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cornell University—where he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship—and a BA in Physics from Princeton University. He has been invited to panels on the science of violence (Santa Fe Council on Int’l Relations) and on the physics of the 2021 Nobel Prize (Santa Fe Institute) as well as lectures at the universities of Amsterdam, Potsdam, Northwestern, Oxford, and Bristol.

A short CV is available here.

Google Scholar page

Niraj Kushwaha

Niraj is a junior researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the PoET Lab within the Complexity Science Hub. His research focuses on understanding collective behavior and emergent phenomena in social systems, with a particular emphasis on developing data-driven frameworks to analyze armed conflicts. Niraj’s interests span across statistical physics, collective behavior, network science, computational modeling, data analysis, and machine learning. He looks at the world from a physics lens and aims to uncover the hidden universal laws of nature through the diverse methodologies encompassed by complexity science. Niraj holds a Master's degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Indore.

Personal website.

Gavin Rees

Gavin Rees is a Junior Research Scientist in the PoET Lab at the Complexity Science Hub, focusing on using statistical modeling to understand collective behavior and evolutionary dynamics in social systems, and designing social systems that leverage these phenomena for societal benefit. He's particularly interested in using large data sets, from collaborative systems, social interactions, and political bodies, to empirically understand the evolution of cooperation and complex social behaviors. Methodologically, he's interested in Bayesian modeling, probabilistic machine learning, and evolutionary game theory. Prior to joining the PoET Lab, Gavin graduated Harvard with a bachelors in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science, worked as a software engineer at Markforged in Boston, and then as a research assistant at Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

Ernesto Ortega

Ernesto Ortega Díaz is a Visiting Researcher at the PoET lab. His research explores the interplay of statistical physics and complex systems, focusing on dynamic processes on networks. His research ranges from epidemics, innovation-obsolescence, opinion dynamics and social interactions such as crime networks. His work digs into how mathematical and computational models can unveil the underlying mechanisms of these systems, aiming to provide insights into both theoretical and practical challenges.

Ernesto has a PhD in Physics from the University of Havana, where he also completed his Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Physics Engineering. He did a postdoc at the Complexity Science Hub. Ernesto's academic journey includes significant teaching and mentorship roles in Havana University and University of Informatics Science in Cuba.

Shlok Shah

Shlok Shah is an incoming summer intern at the Complexity Science Hub, passionate about the intersection of mathematics and computation. As a rising junior at Princeton University, studying computer science, Shlok is deeply interested in computational modeling and machine learning. At the Hub, Shlok will focus on leveraging these techniques to better understand the dynamics of armed conflicts, exploring how computational tools can model intricate patterns in the data.

Clemens Baldzuhn

Clemens Baldzuhn is an incoming summer intern at the Complexity Science Hub and is interested in leveraging quantitative models to advance social science. With a dual bachelor's degree in Psychology and Sociology he is currently pursuing a joint master's program in Statistics in Berlin. At the Hub, Clemens will focus on the model of armed conflict dynamics, exploring how to enhance its generalizability to better understand and predict complex social phenomena.