Womplexity Meets Northeast

G. Cigdem Yalcin currently works at the Department of Physics, Istanbul University. Her research interests are in complexity science, network theory, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical physics of complex systems, including mathematical modelling of complex systems and interdisciplinary applications.

Amanda Perofsky is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health and Health Sciences at Northeastern University's Bouvé College, with joint appointments in the Network Science Institute, Roux Institute, and Institute for Experiential AI. Trained as an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, she investigates how viral evolution, pathogen interactions, population immunity, and human behavior jointly shape infectious disease dynamics. Before joining Northeastern, she worked as a research scientist with the Seattle Flu Study at the University of Washington and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Fogarty International Center, U.S. National Institutes of Health; she earned her PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Laura Hernández is a physicist and associate professor (MCF-HDR) at LPTM UMR8089, CNRS and CY Cergy Paris University. Her research addresses complex systems through the interdisciplinary application of network theory, statistical physics, and dynamical systems theory. Her approach combines theoretical modelling with phenomenological studies of large-scale data, including data drawn from online social networks.

Ekaterina (Kath) Landgren is a Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, where she works with Sara Constantino and Madalina Vlasceanu. She was previously a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with Matt Burgess, and she holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University. She has used dynamical systems models to study phenomena ranging from voter turnout to planets beyond our solar system, and her current research brings these threads together around the social dimensions of climate change, asking how societies move toward large-scale responses to the climate crisis and how a person's position within a system shapes their view of it. Her broader interests span complex systems, open science, and interdisciplinary research.

Irene Ferri is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute, where she works on human mobility data with applications in public health. She previously completed her Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Barcelona's Institute of Complex Systems, with research focused on opinion modeling on complex and multilayer networks. Her doctoral work explored the dynamics of belief evolution within interconnected systems, aiming to understand collective behaviors emerging from individual interactions. Irene holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics and a Master's degree in Computational Modeling from the University of Barcelona. She has been actively involved in academic community roles, serving as Coordinator of the Complex Systems Society US-Northeast Chapter.