About

Thank you for visiting my website! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Simon Levin, Naomi Leonard, and Corina Tarnita. Born in Japan, I grew up in Tokyo, went to high school just outside of NYC and in northeast Italy, and completed my undergraduate degree at Yale University.

As a mathematical biologist and an applied mathematician, I use tools from evolutionary game theory, dynamical systems, and network science to explore mathematical and computational models of collective and emergent behavior in social systems. I am especially interested in understanding how inter-individual differences and population structures influence and are influenced by collective dynamics. My recent and current projects have focused on self-organized division of labor in ant colonies, hierarchies in adaptive networks, and cooperation and polarization in group-structured populations, among others.

As a teacher, I strive to practice inclusive teaching in undergraduate classrooms. I am a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, and I also serve as a Resident Graduate Student in First College, one of the undergraduate residential colleges at Princeton. As a member of the Princeton Women in STEM Leadership Council (WSTEM), I work with campus partners to foster conversations about diversity and inclusion in STEM at Princeton.

Please feel free to contact me at mari [dot] kawakatsu [at] princeton [dot] edu.

Recent News

• May 2021: Honored to have our paper on the emergence of hierarchy in endorsement networks featured in a PNAS commentary!
• May 2021: I will be giving a talk at SIAM Conf. on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS21).
• May 2021: I will be giving a Theoretical Ecology Lab Tea talk with Sebastián Michel-Mata.
• April 2021: “Emergence of hierarchy in networked endorsement dynamics” with Phil Chodrow, Nicole Eikmeier, and Dan Larremore is now published in in PNAS!
• March 2021: I will be serving as the Communications Secretary for the Women in Network Science (WiNS) Society for 2021-22. Follow us on Twitter, and email us at wins [dot] society [at] gmail [dot] com with any questions about WiNS.
• January & February 2021: I co-organized a WSTEM event on inclusive teaching at Princeton.
• January 2021: I participated in the virtual Complex Networks Winter Workshop.
• November 2020: I gave an invited talk on our recent work on modeling emergent hierarchies with Phil Chodrow, Nicole Eikmeier, and Dan Larremore at the Women in Network Science Seminar. Videos are available: part 1 and part 2.