Postdoctoral Fellow, Santa Fe Institute
About
I am an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Before that, I was a Schmidt Science Fellow at Cornell working with Steven Strogatz. I got my Ph.D. in Physics from Northwestern in 2020, advised by Adilson Motter. You can reach me at yzhang@santafe.edu.
My interest lies at the interface of networks and nonlinear dynamics. In my research, I draw techniques from dynamical systems, graph theory, and machine learning to help elucidate how order emerges from chaos in coupled systems. Some topics I worked on recently include the effect of disorder on network dynamics, topological control of dynamical patterns (cluster synchronization and chimera states), networks with nonpairwise interactions, basins of attraction in high-dimensional systems, and learning unknown dynamical systems from data.
Research Projects
Chimera states
exploring dynamical patterns in which coherence and incoherence coexist
Order out of disorder
for interacting entities, sometimes to converge they must diverge
Topological control
manipulating synchronization patterns through minimal topological perturbations
Simultaneous block diagonalization
a unified framework to characterize the stability of synchronization patterns in both standard and generalized networks
Basins with tentacles
exploring basin structures in high-dimensional systems
Temporal sync
designing temporal networks that synchronize under resource constraints