Onkar Sadekar

Most of network science is built on pairs — two people, one link. But much of what people actually do happens in groups: a team, a hunting party, a committee, a village.

My research asks what changes when you model those group interactions directly, using higher-order networks, and what that means for one of the oldest questions in the social sciences: why do people cooperate at all? It turns out the answer depends a great deal on the shape of the groups you belong to — sometimes so sharply that cooperation appears all at once, in an explosive transition.

I came to this from statistical physics, which is where I started: stochastic processes, active matter, systems held far from equilibrium. I still like problems where a deliberately simple model produces behaviour nobody ordered — whether that is a sudden onset of cooperation, the spread of tool use between chimpanzee communities, or a batting collapse in a cricket match.