Participating Faculty

Click on the photo to view their respective home pages.

	Josh Bongard Associate Professor Computer Science	Josh Bongard's work focuses on understanding the general nature of cognition, regardless of whether it is found in humans, animals or robots. His approach focuses on the role that morphology and evolution plays in cognition, and has taken him into the fields of biology, psychology, engineering and computer science.
	Chris Danforth Associate Professor Mathematics	Chris Danforth is an applied mathematician interested in modeling a variety of physical, biological, and social phenomenon. He has applied principles of chaos theory to improve weather forecasts as a member of the Mathematics and Climate Research Network, and developed a real-time remote sensor of global happiness using messages from Twitter. He also helps run UVM's reading group on complexity.
	Margaret Eppstein (Co-PI) Associate Professor Computer Science	Maggie Eppstein's research focuses on the development and use of bio-inspired computing methodologies, including evolutionary computation, agent-based models, complex networks, and artificial neural networks. She applies these methods to the modeling and analysis of a wide variety of complex biological, environmental, sociological, and/or technological systems.
	Jeff Frolik Associate Professor Engineering	Jeff Frolik studies sensor networks and wireless communications, including applications in smart grid power networks and in systems operating in harsh environmental and propagation environments. He has developed architectures for systems where the availability of individual sensor nodes is dynamic and where the multipath fading environment exceeds the severity of Rayleigh statistics. Some of his research also deals with techniques to conserve energy in severely constrained systems, such as for monitoring snow packs and during extraterrestrial exploration.
	Diann Gaalema Assistant Professor Psychiatry	Diann Gaalema's research deals with the effect of incentives on human behavior. Her previous research has dealt with behavioral response in low-income populations and behavioral interventions to increase breastfeeding in low-SES women.
	Stephen Higgins (Co-PI) Professor Psychiatry	Stephen Higgins studies the effect of incentives on human behavior. His research has been used to develop effective treatment methods for cocaine dependence, treatment of cigarette smoking during pregnancy, behavioral pharmacology.
	Paul Hines (Co-PI) Assistant Professor Engineering	Paul Hines' work broadly focuses on finding ways to make electric energy more reliable, more affordable, with less environmental impact. Particular topics of interest include understanding the mechanisms by which small problems in the power grid become large blackouts (cascading failure), identifying and mitigating the stresses that could be caused by large amounts of electric vehicle charging, and quantifying the impact of high penetrations of wind and solar on electricity systems.
	Chris Koliba (Co-PI) Associate Professor Community Development and Applied Economics	Chris Koliba is interested, broadly, in questions pertaining to the governance of democratic societies. By observing and modeling the inter-organizational networks of public, private and nonprofit entities that govern modern societies as complex adaptive systems, he seeks to better understand how these governance networks may be designed to perform more effectively and with greater measures of accountability.
	Jeff Marshall (PI) Professor Engineering	Jeff Marshall studies the dynamics of fluid and particulate systems from a complex systems perspective. For instance, his studies of turbulent flow focus on vortex interactions with each other and with structural elements, and his studies of multiphase fluids focus on collective dynamics of adhesive particle systems. His research is applied to a wide variety of problems, including dust mitigation, algae biofuels, cardiovascular and digestive flows, sediment transport, wind turbines, nanoparticle dispersion processes, and helicopter fluid dynamics.
	Kurt Oughstun Professor Engineering	Kurt Oughstun studies electromagnetic and optical field theory, wave propagation phenomena, and applied mathematics. His research has been applied to ultrawideband-signal, ultrashort-pulse electromagnetic field characteristics, impulse radar systems, image formation and analysis, stable and unstable open optical cavity mode properties, optical beam transfer systems, adaptive optics, integrated optics devices, and fiber optics communications systems.
	Donna Rizzo Associate Professor Engineering	Donna Rizzo's research focuses on the development of new computational tools to improve the understanding of human-induced changes on natural systems and the way we make decisions about natural resources and multi-scale environmental problems.
	Chris Skalka Associate Professor Computer Science	Chris Skalka's research lies at the intersection of computer science theory and practice. His work has focused on the design of programming languages, especially type disciplines, to support security and safety in programs. This includes general purpose languages and domain specific languages for embedded systems. He also studies the real-world application of modern embedded systems software and hardware to environmental sciences.
	Sara Solnick Professor Economics	Sara Solnick's research has been directed at looking beyond the standard, neoclassical economic model to explore the social or behavioral factors that influence the outcomes that we observe. The economic model of behavior is very powerful and has allowed economists to address many aspects of human behavior. Yet the standard model does leave things to be desired, and her work in those gaps focuses on two particular questions and approaches. One is using experiments as a means to uncover gender differences that have implications in labor markets and other interactions. The other is understanding when and how much position matters in order to make appropriate predications and policy.
	Xindong Wu Professor Computer Science	Xindong Wu studies data mining, knowledge-based systems, and web information exploration.
	Asim Zia Assistant Professor Community Development and Applied Economics	Asim Zia's research focuses on the development of computational and complex-systems based approaches for informing the theory and practice of public policy analysis. He applies computational modeling approaches to evaluate complex policy and governance problems that span global climate change, energy, transportation, forest conservation, disaster management, watershed management and international development.