Active biosystems
Swimming bacteria, swarms, and social insects. Coupled PDE/ODE models that reproduce lane formation in ant raids and the viscosity collapse in bacterial suspensions.
I build agent-based models and differential equations that turn the behavior of bacteria, ants, and cells into predictive theory, and I'm teaching those models to discover their own governing equations.
The thread running through everything I do is interaction. Bacteria pushing fluid, ants laying pheromone, chromosomes finding their pairs. Local rules, followed by many agents, produce behavior no single agent contains. I write the models that predict when that behavior emerges and what it changes about the system.
Swimming bacteria, swarms, and social insects. Coupled PDE/ODE models that reproduce lane formation in ant raids and the viscosity collapse in bacterial suspensions.
Active rods accumulating at the walls of microchannels, self-propelled Janus colloids, and how confinement and propulsion set the structure of synthetic active systems.
Agent-based chromosome pairing in meiosis, synthetic microbial consortia, and clinical models estimating postoperative urine output after pediatric cardiac surgery.
Individual-carcass and spatial models of Campylobacter and E. coli through poultry chilling. USDA-NIFA funded, built with experimentalists and public-health partners.
PINNs and BINNs that recover governing equations directly from agent-based simulations.
Agent-based models capture the biology, but they don't hand you a governing equation. These questions are what the research group is excited about. Physics-informed and biology-informed neural networks (PINNs / BINNs) can learn the continuum PDE hiding inside an ABM, turning a simulation into a theory you can analyze.
Provost's Distinguished Teaching Award (University)
Jearl D. Walker Teaching Award (College of Arts and Sciences)
Five CSU Golden Apple Teaching Awards (alumni-nominated)
Penn State Pritchard Dissertation Award
Barry M. Goldwater Scholar
Associate Editor, Involve: A Journal of Mathematics
Review Editor, Frontiers in Systems Biology
Work with the group
I mentor students through real research, from foraging models to food-safety projects to the new equation-learning work. If you want to build models that connect to experiments, get in touch.