Research

Higher-order interactions

Complex networks are everywhere, and commonly represented as graphs of nodes with interactions. Why graphs? Why restrict interactions to pairwise? Combinatorial and higher-order dependence structures are ubiquitous in Nature, and I’m interested in how to use them to understand complex systems.

Stator: Higher-order genetic interactions and cells states

I study the role of higher-order interactions in particular in biomedicine, and developed a method called Stator to use such higher-order interactions among molecules to identify new cell states hiding in single-cell transcriptomic data sets. Here, we used this to find future fates of embryonic neurons, and liver cancer states that are prognostic of patient survival.

Interactions and information theory

I’ve also shown how such higher-order interactions are centrally located in the landscape of higher-order information theory. Currently, I’m a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, where I look at the role of higher-order information theory in other complex systems, such as n-qubit quantum circuits.