Research

Research Interests

My research interests are broad and interdisciplinary, but they center around using mathematical ideas from network science, game theory, and probability to build and analyze models of complex social systems. To me, mathematics is a set of powerful tools to better understand the increasingly complex world around us. New modes of group behavior continue to emerge in our society, and I work every day to understand how these complex systems function and how to adjust them to bring about a better world. My work involves a mix of mathematical analysis, computer simulation, and real-world data.

The papers below include work on group coordination, polarization, misinformation, multi-issue decision-making and voting, and catch-and-release fishing.

I have ongoing research projects on homophily and cooperation, group creativity, leader influence on group consensus, and vote trading.

Published Papers

Estimating Recycling of Fish in Catch-and-Release Fisheries (with T. Jones, M. Treml, and T. Heinrich), Fisheries 47(12), 2022 (pdf)

Polarization, abstention, and the median voter theorem (with A. Sirianni and F. Fu), Humanities and Social Science Communications 9(43), 2022 (pdf)

The dual problems of coordination and anti-coordination on random bipartite graphs (with S. Pauls and F. Fu), New Journal of Physics 23(113018), 2021 (pdf)

Random choices facilitate solutions to collective network coloring problems by artificial agents (with S. Pauls and F. Fu), iScience 24(4), 2021 (pdf)

Preprints

It Is Easy For Multi-Issue Bundles To Advance Anti-Democratic Agendas (with M. Chervenak and N. Christakis), arXiv: 2307.11873, 2023 (pdf)

Spatial Games of Fake News (with S. Pauls and F. Fu), arXiv: 2206.04118, 2022 (pdf)

Ph.D. Thesis

Here is a link to my Ph.D. thesis, titled Evolutionary Dynamics of Collective Action Problems (pdf)