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I am a mathematician who uses models to investigate the dynamics of communities and groups, in both ecological and social settings.

Several of the projects I've worked on have involved transitions between competitive and cooperative dynamics or long-term changes in structure and process in complex communities. The thread that connects my research is my underlying interest in distributed governance: how to coexist to mutual benefit when control is not centralized but immanent throughout the community.

I completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 2003, focusing on evolution and ecology.

From 2003 through 2005 I worked with Alan Hastings and Louis Botsford at UC Davis, on the population biology of age-structured Pacific salmon species. From 2005 through 2007, I was a Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, working on research related to self-organization and sustainability. After 2007 I worked for several years with Jonathan Dushoff's team at McMaster University, working on dynamics of social norms in relation to global public health issues.

Currently I'm working with Travis Porco's team at UC San Francisco on dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks, including measles, influenza, Ebola, trachoma, and leprosy. I'm also part of a project on epidemiology of breast cancer.

I'm the author and maintainer of WorkingWiki, an extension to the widely-used MediaWiki software package that makes it into a platform for managing research data together with the software scripts that process the data, simulation software, the figures made from the software's output, and the papers that include the figures.

When I get a chance I'm pursuing research on dynamics of collective decision making as well (see the project page), and continuing work on older projects.

Updates

I'm posting updates in two different sections of this site:
News and Research: updates for general consumption (visible in the right column of this page);
Open Lab Notebook: more detail-oriented updates on ongoing projects.