Theoretical biology

Freedom comes with the recognition of necessity. Thus, collectives depend on social contracts. We view demographic development of local populations as social in the sense that they exhibit highly integrated and co-regulated behavior. Taken to the extreme they behave like multicellular systems.  We are interested on the conditions on which bacteria associate strongly and perform in teams operating at multiple scales and with conflicting interests across these scales.

We study specific games such prisoner dilemma, public goods, etc in order to merge them with space competition models to study the interaction between conflict, cooperation, cheating in space competition models based on interacting particle systems.

This program is the counterpart to our experimental efforts on Cooperation.