We are a research team whose center of gravity is at the Complexity Science Hub. We are regularly hosting students, research interns, and collaborators.
Clemens Baldzuhn
TU Berlin
2024
Shlok Shah
Princeton
2024
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 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 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 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 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.