Leadership
Neil F. Johnson, Head
Neil Johnson is a professor of Physics at GW and heads up cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science to attack complex real-world problems. His research interests lie in the broad area of complex systems and ‘many-body’ out-of-equilibrium systems of collections of objects, ranging from crowds of particles to crowds of people and from environments as distinct as quantum information processing through to the online world of collective behavior on social media. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and is the recipient of the 2018 Burton Award from the APS.
Yonatan Lupu
Yonatan Lupu is associate professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. His research interests include online extremism, political violence, human rights, and international relations. His research has appeared in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, American Journal of International Law, Journal of Politics, International Security, and Nature.
Richard Sear
Rick Sear is a programmer and data admin with the Dynamic Online Networks Lab. He has a degree in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and Physics. At the DON Lab, Rick manages the team’s database and data pipelines. He works with many kinds of machine learning and NLP models to glean insights from the team’s data at scale. He also manages this website!
- Lucia Illari is a Ph.D. student in Physics at the George Washington University. They received their B.A. in Physics from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2017. At GW, they are studying the mesoscopic scale of interacting shockwaves or giant components which have formed along different “character” axes. This is done via a system of approximate, interacting differential equations and using a variety of online datasets (e.g., COVID-19, monkeypox, abortions, distrust in elections).
- Dr. Minzhang Zheng is a research scientist with the Dynamic Online Network Lab. He received his PhD from the University of Miami in 2019. His research interests are in complex systems, including social media and system biology. At the DON Lab, he works with data collection, data analysis and modeling.
- Dr. Pedro Manrique conducts research aimed at understanding collective behavior and emerging phenomena in heterogeneous time-varying populations and networks. These efforts have yielded effective multi-scale mathematical and computational models capable of describing key statistical patterns and dynamics of systems ranging from the biological (e.g., antibiotic resistance, simple crawling organisms, epidemics processes) and up to the social domains (e.g., online communities under pressure). Additional efforts include the design of data-driven tools able to identify optimal property spaces associated with permeators and inhibitors of Gram-Negative P. aeruginosa, and graph theory analysis of all-atom molecular dynamics simulations identifying vulnerabilities of the Spike protein causing COVID-19.
- Frank Huo
- Sara El Oud
- Nick Gabriel
- Chenkai Xia