Yixian Song

Yixian's wide face

Personal Nature

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

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. So don't worry!
• Favorite song, currently, "Burning" of The Whitest Boy Alive.

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 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 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 interested to estimate the critical virulence of a virus from which the virus can drive a bacterial population til extinction, in consideration of the initial population size of bacteria and nutritional limitation.