Mari Kawakatsu

Mari Kawakatsu

JSMF Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania

Welcome to my website! I am a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where I work with Joshua Plotkin. I obtained my PhD in applied and computational mathematics from Princeton University.

I am an applied mathematician and a theoretical biologist studying cooperation and collective behavior in complex systems. My work integrates tools from evolutionary game theory, dynamical systems, and network science to explore topics including

  • the role of peer-to-peer gossip in cooperation;
  • the impact of stereotype use on indirect reciprocity;
  • cooperation and polarization in group-structured populations;
  • emergent hierarchies in adaptive networks; and
  • self-organized division of labor in ant colonies.


News

September 2025: I attended the Postdocs in Complexity Conference at the Santa Fe Institute.

May 2025: I gave a talk in the Prosocial Dynamics Lab, part of the Socially Intelligent Artificial Systems Group in the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam.

May 2025: I attended the second Beijer Young Scholars workshop in Stockholm, Sweden.

May 2025: I attended the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS25) in Denver, CO, where I gave a talk in the minisymposium on Dynamical Systems on Networks and Fractals (MS118) and served as a panelist in The Future of Interdisciplinary Research in Dynamical Systems: A Panel Discussion (PD1).

January 2025: I gave a talk at the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences (MIMS) in Tokyo, Japan.

October 2024: Our Research Briefing, “‘Look twice and forgive once’ when judging social behaviour” (with Sebastián Michel-Mata), is now published in Nature!

October 2024: “Ecological principles for the evolution of communication in collective systems” (with Merlijn Staps and Corina Tarnita) is now published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B!

September 2024: “The evolution of private reputations in information-abundant landscapes” led by Sebastián Michel-Mata is now published in Nature! Check out the Penn Today article about this work here.

September 2024: I attended Postdocs in Complexity: Global Summit at the Santa Fe Institute.

June 2024: I attended the SIAM Conference on the Life Sciences (LS24) in Portland, OR.

May 2024: I participated in the first Beijer Young Scholars workshop in Stockholm, Sweden.

May 2024: “A mechanistic model of gossip, reputations, and cooperation” (with Taylor Kessinger and Joshua Plotkin) is now published in PNAS! Check out the Penn Today article about this work here.