Welcome to my website! I am an applied mathematician and a theoretical biologist at the University of Michigan, where I am an LSA Collegiate Fellow (2026–2027) and an incoming Assistant Professor (2027–) in the Department of Mathematics and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

I use mathematics and computation to study cooperation and collective behavior in complex systems. Recent research topics include

• the role of peer-to-peer gossip in cooperation;
• interplay between direct and indirect reciprocity;
• cooperation and polarization in group-structured populations;
• emergent hierarchies in adaptive networks; and
• self-organized division of labor in ant colonies.

My group will be recruiting at all levels. More information will be available soon; in the meantime, prospective students and postdocs are encouraged to reach out. I welcome inquiries from scholars of all backgrounds.

News

November 2026: I will give a Midwest Mathematical Biology Seminar.

October 2026: I will attend the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS2026) in Binghamton, NY. I will give a contributed talk on our recent preprint as well as a keynote talk in the Complexity Research in Animal Behaviour (CRAB) satellite.

August 2026: I have moved to the University of Michigan!

June 2026: New preprint! “A model of local and global reciprocity” (with Yohsuke Murase, Taylor Kessinger, and Joshua Plotkin) is out on arXiv.

May 2026: I attended the third Beijer Young Scholars workshop in Stockholm.

January 2026: I attended ICMMA 2025 Cooperative Strategies and Dynamics in Social Systems: from Human to Insect Societies at Meiji University in Tokyo.

December 2025: I gave a talk at the CCSS Workshop on Computational Social Science: Methods and Applications at Kobe University in Kobe.

September 2025: I attended the Postdocs in Complexity Conference at the Santa Fe Institute.

May 2025: I gave a talk in the Prosocial Dynamics Lab, part of the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems Group in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam.

May 2025: I attended the second Beijer Young Scholars workshop in Stockholm.

May 2025: I attended the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS25) in Denver, CO, where I gave a talk in the minisymposium on Dynamical Systems on Networks and Fractals (MS118) and served as a panelist in The Future of Interdisciplinary Research in Dynamical Systems: A Panel Discussion (PD1).

January 2025: I gave a talk at the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences (MIMS) in Tokyo.

October 2024: Our Research Briefing, “‘Look twice and forgive once’ when judging social behaviour” (with Sebastián Michel-Mata), is now published in Nature!

October 2024: “Ecological principles for the evolution of communication in collective systems” led by Merlijn Staps is now published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B!

September 2024: “The evolution of private reputations in information-abundant landscapes” led by Sebastián Michel-Mata is now published in Nature! Check out the Penn Today article about this work here.

September 2024: I attended Postdocs in Complexity: Global Summit at the Santa Fe Institute.

June 2024: I attended the SIAM Conference on the Life Sciences (LS24) in Portland, OR.

May 2024: I participated in the first Beijer Young Scholars workshop in Stockholm.

May 2024: “A mechanistic model of gossip, reputations, and cooperation” (with Taylor Kessinger and Joshua Plotkin) is now published in PNAS! Check out the Penn Today article about this work.