Adam Pah has passed his IBiS department Qualifying Exam and is now admitted to PhD candidacy.
Alumnus' research featured in Ecology Letters.
The persistence of species in an ecosystem is strongly influenced by the food web — the network of predator-prey interactions between species. Amaral lab alumnus Daniel Stouffer and his post-doctoral advisor Jordi Bascompte demonstrate that specific interaction patterns confer persistence upon the community whereas others have the opposite effect. Moreover, ...
Facebook (and Systems Biologists) Take Note: Network Analysis Reveals True Connections
Facebook figures out that you know Holly, although you haven’t seen her in 10 years, because you have four mutual friends — a good predictor of direct friendship. But sometimes Facebook gets it wrong. “Hey, I don’t know Harry!” Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo, a husband-wife research team at Northwestern ...
Rufaro Mukogo and Xiaohan Zeng (ChBE) join the Amaral lab for their thesis work.
Rufaro Mukogo and Xiaohan Zeng (ChBE Department) both join the Amaral Lab for their graduate research and thesis work.
The role of controversy in scientific discourse
Returning from a scientific meeting reminded me again of the current bias against controversy in scientific discussions. Maybe as a result of the hazing-like practices in some circles (math, statistics, old Sovietic academic institutions), many now appear to abhor public disagreement on scientific matters. This is sad, as there is ...
Dr. Stringer successfully defends his PhD Thesis
Michael J. Stringer successfully defends his PhD thesis. Mike has worked on a complex systems approach to bibliometrics, the quantitative study of the scientific process. His contributions include an analysis of the effectiveness of journal ranking schemes as a tool for locating information (available here) and a study of the ...
How would Einstein use email?
You’re not as different from Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin after all, at least when it comes to patterns of correspondence. A new Northwestern University study of human behavior has determined that those who wrote letters using pen and paper — long before electronic mail existed — did so in ...
Postdoctoral positions
The Amaral Lab invites applications for several postdoctoral positions. We conduct high-impact research in the area of complex systems. Current research projects include systems-level study of cellular metabolism, modeling of ecosystem structure and robustness, modeling of human activity patterns, and quantification of research productivity. Hires will be expected to conduct ...
Dr. Malmgren successfully defends his PhD Thesis
R. Dean Malmgren successfully defends his PhD thesis. Dean’s work has revolved around understanding complex systems from the behavior of their constituents. In particular, Dean has focused on understanding human activity patterns, and his work has been published in top journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...
Being timely or the need to "convert" editors and reviewers
Steve Wiley discusses in “The Scientist” (Timing is Everything) the importance of timeliness in one’s research. One does not want to be behind the curve, but neither does one want to be too ahead of the curve. This raises the question of what to do if you are too ahead ...
Adam Pah admitted to Biotechnology Training Program
Adam Pah has been admitted to the NIH-funded Biotechnology Training Program. The Northwestern Biotechnology Training Program is an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental program which provides select graduate students (Trainees) greater research and training opportunities than those available through the individual departments. It promotes interdisciplinary education in biotechnology, interactions among faculty and ...
Making a bad situation worse
There is a general consensus that many things are wrong with the way U.S. intelligence agencies operate. The weaknesses of the present system have been clearly brought to light by the 9/11 commission’s report. Included in that report is a recommendation to create the new position of national intelligence director ...
It all comes down to the people in your team.
In 2002, the Pentagon picked Paul van Riper, a retired Marine and a veteran of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, to lead the “enemy” forces battling US forces in the Millenium Challenge war game. Van Riper’s mission was “clearly: impossible; his forces had to contain much better ...
Expert evaluation vs. citation analysis
The recent Nature editorial “Experts still needed” (Nature, vol 457,pp. 7-8, 2009) made me smile with amusement. There is no question that there is still a significant lack of understandingof what bibliometric measures actually measure, and that the heavy,simple-minded, use of such metrics for evaluation of disciplines,nations, organizations, or scientists ...
Amaral promoted to Full Professor
Northwestern University has promoted Luís Amaral to the rank of Full Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering.
Duch, Guimerà, Sales-Pardo appointed to tenure-track faculty positions
Dr. Roger Guimerà, a research assistant professor in our group, was offered a position as a senior research professor in ICREA. This is a tenured position corresponding to full professor which will be associated with the Department of Chemical Engineering at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Tarragona, Catalonia. ICREA, an ...
Amaral receives secondary appointment with Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has granted Luís Amaral a secondary appointment in the Department of Medicine. The appointment, at the rank of Associate Professor of Medicine, is effective June 1st, 2009, to August 31st, 2011.
Nicolas Pelaez joins the Amaral and Carthew Labs for his thesis work.
Graduate student Nicolas Pelaez (IBiS) program joins the Amaral and Carthew Labs for his thesis work.