Michael Raghib Moreno

Michael Raghib is originally from Colombia. He is a postdoctoral research associate jointly appointed in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (with Simon A. Levin) and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (with Yannis G. Kevrekidis) at Princeton University. He is interested in measure-valued stochastic processes and their deterministic approximations, with rules/interactions motivated by problems in spatial ecology. His PhD research in Applied Mathematics, at the University of Glasgow, revolved around spatial-temporal point process models of plant population dynamics, extensions of those models to include size structure, and new closure methods based on entropy maximization. Current work deals with scaling phenomena and group-level decision making in collective animal behavior. We have focused in self-propelled particle models of swarms, which comprise both naive and informed individuals (in collaboration with I.Couzin). We have explored the poulation-level properties of these systems with a mixture of methods drawn from anomalous diffusion, and equation-free, multiscale approaches, the latter being well suited when the population-level models are not available in closed form, but there are good individual-level descriptions. Other areas of interest include adaptive dynamics and contact processes. homepage