From Social Networks to Gene Networks: a Lecture on Unified View of Network Science

What does academia have to do with gene regulation?  What do animal social groups have to do with your brain? From the point of view of a network scientist such as Daniel Larremore, an assistant professor of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at University of Colorado Boulder, insight on each of these scenarios can be gained by viewing their fundamental network structure. Animals and academics interact in social networks, genes interact in a regulatory network, your brain is a network of neurons.

Larremore seeks principles which help us to understand networks in general.

He will speak on this research at 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, in PHYS 133. His research and his lecture may interest a diverse U of A faculty and students including physics, math, sociology, biology and more.

More specifically, Larremore's research develops statistical and inferential methods for analyzing large-scale network data, and uses those methods to solve applied problems in diverse domains, including public health and academic labor markets. In particular, his work focuses on generative models for networks, the ongoing evolution of the malaria parasite and the origins of social inequalities in academic hiring and careers.

Prior to joining the University of Colorado faculty, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute 2015-2017 and a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 2012-2015. He obtained his doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012, and holds an undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis.