The short version. Networks are usually drawn as pairs of things joined by lines. That is a good model for a phone call and a poor one for a committee, a hunting party, or a football team. When you let interactions involve three, four or twenty people at once — a higher-order network — familiar results change, sometimes qualitatively. My work is about finding where they change, and why.
01
Higher-order networks & the evolution of cooperation
Drivers of cooperation in social dilemmas on higher-order networks — J. R. Soc. Interface 2025;
Evolutionary game selection creates cooperative environments — PRE 2024
Classical evolutionary game theory puts two players in a dilemma and asks when
cooperation survives. Real social dilemmas are rarely two-player: public goods,
common resources and collective action all involve groups.
Modelling those games on hypergraphs and simplicial complexes changes the
picture. Cooperation can appear explosively — a discontinuous transition, with
hysteresis, rather than the smooth onset the pairwise theory predicts. Which
mechanism dominates depends on how groups overlap, how benefits scale with group
size, and how players choose which game to play.
- Evolutionary game theory
- Hypergraphs
- Simplicial complexes
- Public goods games
Key papers
02
Collective human behaviour
Evidence that group interactions matter is scattered across statistical physics,
experimental economics, social psychology and computational social science, and
the fields rarely read each other.
With colleagues across those areas I have worked to draw that evidence together:
where higher-order effects have actually been measured in human behaviour, which
models capture them, and what the open problems are for anyone trying to predict
what a group will do.
- Computational social science
- Behavioural experiments
- Synthesis
Key papers
03
Cultural evolution & social structure
Cumulative culture — knowledge that gets better as it is passed along — needs
both innovation and enough connection between people for innovations to travel
and combine.
Working with evolutionary anthropologists, I use genetic and ecological data to
reconstruct how connected populations are, and ask whether that connectivity
predicts the complexity of their culture. In chimpanzees it does: more connected
populations have more complex tool use. My current work in Zürich extends this to
contemporary hunter-gatherer societies.
- Evolutionary anthropology
- Cumulative culture
- Population connectivity
Key papers
04
Nonequilibrium statistical physics
Thermodynamic uncertainty relation for energy transport — PRE 2021;
Zero-current nonequilibrium state in symmetric exclusion process — J. Stat. Mech. 2020
Where I started, and still the toolkit I reach for first. Stochastic processes
driven away from equilibrium: what happens to a random walker that is
periodically reset to its origin, how self-propelled particles behave under the
same protocol, and how tightly fluctuations constrain transport in small systems.
- Stochastic resetting
- Active matter
- Thermodynamic uncertainty relations
Key papers
05
Networks in the wild
From streaks to synergies: performance and scoring in the NBA — arXiv 2026;
An infectious diseases hazard map for India — Curr. Sci. 2021
Some problems are worth doing because the data is good and the question is fun.
Separating individual skill from team context in cricket and basketball; mapping
how India’s mobility and transport networks would carry an infectious disease.
These projects keep me honest: a model that only works on synthetic networks is
not yet a model of anything.
- Sports analytics
- Epidemic spreading
- Mobility networks
Key papers