Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with an adjunct appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
I build simulation-based mathematical models of how humans and animals behave — decision-making strategies, collective behavior, population ecology, and the epidemiology of infectious disease and addiction. Most of my work lives at the seam between fields, which means most of it is written in Python.
Planktos — an agent-based modeling framework for small organisms moving through 2D and 3D fluid flows around immersed structures. Agent behavior can be specified by ODEs, SDEs, or arbitrary code; velocity fields load from VTK or NetCDF; immersed boundaries can move. Published in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and supported by NSF DMS-2410988.
I also wrote the original Python implementation of IB2d, an immersed boundary fluid solver.
- Parasitoids — drift-diffusion model of parasitoid wasp dispersal with Bayesian inference
- Heroin_model — ODE models of opioid and heroin/fentanyl population use dynamics (SPAR, SPAHR)
- Locusts_2020 — locust behavior model accompanying Bernoff et al. (2020)
- git_tutorial — teaching materials for graduate students learning version control
Merged contributions to SciPy and powerlaw; bug reports to NumPy, PyVista, and SALib.
Research group: Strickland Lab · Personal site · Google Scholar