Dirk Brockmann joins ESAM faculty
Dirk is a theoretical physicist by training, studied mathematics and physics at Duke University and the University of Göttingen, Germany where he received his PhD in 2003. He then worked as a postdoc and team leader at at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany.
His research focus is on complex dynamical phenomena in physics, biology, sociology, neuroscience and economics. In the past years, Dirk has investigated
systems as diverse as anomalous diffusion processes fractional dynamics, transport phenomena in living cells, dynamics of neural networks and human eye-movements. Recently he became interested in the spread of human infectious diseases such as SARS, HIV/Aids and pandemic influenza. Since then Dirk has made valuable contributions to this field. In 2004 he published the first model that was able to describe the worldwide spread of an emergent human infectious disease (SARS, 2003), taking into account the entire international air transportation network. Shortly afterwards he earned international recognition by scientists and the public with a study in which he discovered fundamental mathematical rules that underlie human travel behavior by analysing the geographic circulation of dollar bills in the United States monitored at the online bill-tracking website wheresgeorge.com.
Dirk is convinced that many of the hardest problems we face today sit at the boundaries of conventional disciplines and that we have to think outside traditional paradigms to tackle them. He is currently developing models for human mediated bioinvasion, the emergence of hierarchies in social networks, understanding the structure of mobility networks and the application of fractional dynamics in these contexts. He’s also investigating the worldwide traffic of travel bugs: tagged items that play a key role in a popular type of GPS treasure hunt known as geocaching.
