About

Thank you for visiting my website. I am a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliate of the Penn Center for Mathematical Biology. My postdoctoral mentor is Joshua Plotkin.

I use mathematical and computational modeling to study collective and cooperative 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.

In 2022, I obtained my PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University, under the mentorship of Simon Levin and Naomi Leonard. Prior to that, I completed my undergraduate studies in Physics and Sociology at Yale University.

Since 2021, I have served as the Communications Secretary for the Women in Network Science (WiNS) Society, which aims to foster opportunities for the education, employment, and career advancement of women, trans, and non-binary scholars in network science. To learn more about our activities, please follow us on X/Twitter.

News

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 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.

May 2024: Dan Cooney, Chadi Saad-Roy, and I co-organized a special session at the AMS Spring 2024 Western Sectional Meeting at San Francisco State University.

April 2024: Anshuman Swain, Grace Smith-Vidaurre, Harrison Hartle, and I co-organized a micro working group titled “Sampling Completeness and Metric Robustness of Bipartite Networks” at the Santa Fe Institute.

March 2024: I presented in the Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium at The College of New Jersey.

March 2024: “When do stereotypes undermine indirect reciprocity?” (with Sebastián Michel-Mata, Taylor Kessinger, Corina Tarnita, Joshua Plotkin) is now published in PLOS Computational Biology! Check out the Penn Today article about this work here.

October 2023: I co-organized Creative Convergence: At the Crossroads of the Arts, Ecology, Neuroscience, and Control Engineering at Princeton University.

October 2023: I attended the Postdocs in Complexity Conference XI at the Santa Fe Institute.

September 2023: I attended the Penn-Meiji Workshop on Mathematical Biology, hosted by the Center for Mathematical Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

May 2023: I attended the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS23) in Portland, OR. Alice Schwarze, Heather Zinn Brooks, and I organized a minisymposium titled “Women in Network Science” on Sunday, May 14th.

March 2023: I attended the Postdocs in Complexity Conference X at the Santa Fe Institute.

March 2023: I attended the American Mathematical Society (AMS) 2023 Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

January 2023: I attended the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems (WWCS) 2023, hosted at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). I gave a talk as part of the Simulation-based Science (SbS) seminar series hosted by UvA’s Institute for Advanced Study.

October 2022: I attended the Postdocs in Complexity Conference IX at the Santa Fe Institute.

September 2022: I attended the Building Networks: Women in Complex & Nonlinear Systems workshop at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS).