Thank you for visiting my website! I am a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliate of the Penn Center for Mathematical Biology. My postdoctoral mentor is Joshua Plotkin.

I use mathematical and computational modeling to study collective and cooperative behavior in complex systems. My work integrates tools from evolutionary game theory, dynamical systems, and network science to explore topics including

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

I received my PhD in applied and computational mathematics from Princeton University. Prior to graduate school, I studied physics and sociology at Yale University.

News

May 2025: I will attend the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS25) in Denver, CO.

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

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” (with Merlijn Staps and Corina Tarnita) 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, Sweden.

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 here.

May 2024: Dan Cooney, Chadi Saad-Roy, and I co-organized a special session at the AMS Spring 2024 Western Sectional Meeting at San Francisco State University.

April 2024: Anshuman Swain, Grace Smith-Vidaurre, Harrison Hartle, and I co-organized a micro working group titled “Sampling Completeness and Metric Robustness of Bipartite Networks” at the Santa Fe Institute.