Welcome

I am Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute, and I am External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

The Clauset Lab

My laboratory's research activities are broad and multidisciplinary, and we are active in several research communities including computational biology, computational social science, complex systems and network science. Generally, my lab studies mechanisms for the emergence and evolution of large-scale patterns from the collective actions and interactions of heterogeneous populations. Much of this work focuses on developing novel statistical and computational methods for automatically analyzing and modeling these phenomena in complex biological, social and technological systems. All our efforts draws heavily on data analysis, machine learning, statistics, probability, algorithms and graph theory. We are particularly interested in interactions between theory and data, and the development of rigorous methods for the study of complex systems.

Three areas of current work are (i) the large-scale organization of complex networks, with particular emphasis on their modular or hierarchical structure; (ii) the mechanisms that shape the macroevolution of biological species across large spatial and temporal scales; and (iii) the political and physical processes that shape the large-scale dynamics of violent human conflicts, such as modern terrorism and warfare.

Structure + Strangeness Blog

Many of these interests also find an outlet on my blog: Structure+Strangeness.

In General

Finally, for a very quick picture of what I work on, here's a word cloud built out of the contents of my papers.