I'm an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. My research currently focuses on three distinct areas: the large-scale organizational patterns of complex social, biological and technological networks; the mechanisms that shape the macroevolution of living things (right now, mainly mammals) across large spatial and temporal scales; and the mathematical structure of violent human conflicts, such as modern terrorism and warfare. In all of this work, I use tools from computer science, physics and statistics to analyze data, characterize its structural patterns, and build computational or mathematical models to explain their origin. I'm particularly interested in the interactions between theory and data, and spend a lot of time thinking about tools for characterizing data from complex systems and testing hypotheses.

Many of these topics, along with a general fascination with the world, underly my interest in blogging about science at Structure+Strangeness. You can find out more about my professional and personal life through the links to the right.

Starting Fall 2010, I join the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, as part of the Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology.