Yixian Song

Yixian's wide face

Personal Nature

• Physicist.
• Grown up in northeastern China.
• Studied in Shanghai (China) and Marburg (Germany).
• Wrote diploma thesis about the dynamics of many-body systems at Philipps University of Marburg.
• Working on PhD thesis, briefly summarized sexual and asexual reproduction with ecological constraints, at Darmstadt University of Technology with supervisions of Barbara Drossel and Stefan Scheu.

Contact

E-mail

Website

Really personal

• Can communicate in German, in English and certainly also in Chinese.
• Could be a little overexcited among new friends in new evironments, but always trying hard to behave well. So don't worry!
• Favorite song, currently, "Burning" of The Whitest Boy Alive.
• Lovely hometown 丹东

Personal greeting words

"Hello everybody, I am truly looking forward to meeting you all at St. John's College! We will have an amazing time together!"

Personal Desire

How can I become a citizen of Argleton? city website

Personal Answers to Professor Dan's Questions

What are your main interests?

• Topics in evolutionary biology especially the origin of sex, the maintenance of sex and also the theory of evolutionary life history.
• Mathematical modelling of population dynamics under ecological considerations.
• Structure and dynamics of social networks.

What sort of expertise can you bring to the group?

Statistics, nonlinear dynamics and computer simulation with C++.

What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?

• Broad overview and outlook of complex systems researches.
• Alternatives of computational techniques and methods.
• Experience of intercultual teamwork.

Besides, I have been wondering if there is a hope to crack sufficient genetic codes to offer the processe of human evolution a good statistic. I hope I could figure the answer out this summer.

Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS?

Yes. In the context of bacterial transformation, it may be interesting to estimate the critical virulence of a virus from which the virus can drive a bacterial population to extinction, in consideration of the initial population size of bacteria and nutritional limitation.

Bacteria live in a gene-pool with abandoned DNA strands. Each bacterium can randomly "eat" DNA strands, and use them as nutrition or for DNA repairing or even gene improvement. But the DNA strands were abandoned for a reason. Some of them can be virulent.(!!!) Besides bacteria can exchange DNA with each other, of course. We can define a population size of bacteria, amount of free DNA strands in gene-pool, percentage of virulent DNA and their virulence (impact on the bacteria fitness). We certainly can also consider the bacteria as a metapopulation.("A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level." - says wikipedia.org) The question to be answered will be "in which situation the bacterial population will become extinct in the end".