A Mechanism-Centered Vision for Emergent Social Order
Research
I study how local interactions between people produce macro-level social order. To me, explaining something means finding the mechanism: why a pattern shows up, when it holds, and when it breaks. Do you have a good research idea or see my skills in your company? Let's team-up and reach out! (students welcome too!)
Criminal networks and Antarctic governance
Two testbeds I've worked with, on the surface unrelated: how criminal networks behave and make decisions internally, and how decisions get made in Antarctic governance, i.e. the management of a global commons. Both show hysteresis and self-organization: history shapes which states are reachable, structures stabilize once they form, and small pressures can tip the whole thing into a different configuration. A covert network resisting disruption and a governance body negotiating shared constraints reward the same kind of mechanism-first analysis.
Form, function, and information theory
Given a model, how do we get to understand its outputs? Having a model is one thing, but understanding its dynamics is sometimes complicated -- especially when analytical solutions are hard to obtain. Complex systems are a sort of dance between its form (network structure) and its function (the dynamics between the members). In past work, I developed metrics that can detect driver nodes on any dynamic and used this to study metastable transitions (tipping points).
Recent output
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Publications
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Total Citations
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