Xiaofan Liang is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning with research interests that support network inclusion in cities and participatory/collaborative processes in planning through urban analytics. Her approaches are largely inspired by the field of network science, complex systems, and critical & participatory approaches in GIS and planning, and therefore, ground her research in the pursuit of authentic human connections and social inclusion in cities.
Dr. Liang gave a talk as part of the Complex Systems Seminar Series this past term: ‘Beyond Nodes and Edges: Integrating Spatial Contexts into Urban Network Science’ on March 26, 2024. She also spent some time with our friends at the Santa Fe Institute during her undergraduate studies, so her interests in Complexity Science are quite well entrenched.
Suraj Shankar's research lies at the interface of physics and biology. He is interested in how collective phenomena emerge, how they can be controlled, and how they become functional in soft materials and living systems. To address these questions, Professor Shankar's group employs a combination of theoretical modeling, computational analysis, and tabletop experiments to uncover general principles from specific examples. Some of the current research topics include controlling active fluids that can flow spontaneously, understanding bacterial dynamics in the gut, the role of feedback and the environment in organ morphogenesis, biophysical constraints in cellular/organismal physiology, and designing bio-inspired metamaterials with unusual mechanical responses.
Dr. Shankar also gave a talk as part of the Complex Systems Seminar Series: ‘Controlling active matter - from drops to defects’ on April 2, 2024 that can be viewed on our video channel.
Professor Shankar's lab website can be found here, and his research can also be found on Google Scholar and Orcid.
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