Aanjaneya Kumar

My research concerns nonequilibrium dynamics in biological and social systems. I study how stochasticity, nonlinearities, and interactions determine their behavior, using mathematical models and tools from statistical physics, network science, and evolutionary game theory.

These systems consist of many interacting units, evolve in time, and often operate out of equilibrium. Averages and steady-state descriptions therefore provide only a partial account of their behavior. I am interested in transient dynamics and full distributions of observables, the occurrence and timing of extreme events, and what can be inferred about a stochastic process from partial observations.

An emerging direction of my research is the interaction between biological and social systems: how social structures influence ecological and disease dynamics, and what these processes can reveal about the structures that shape them.