Lee Worden

= mathematician, studies Ecology, Evolution, Cooperation, and other collective processes.

Bio

Lee Worden is a mathematician who uses models to study how communities work, in both ecological and social settings.

Several of the projects he has worked on have involved transitions between competitive and cooperative dynamics or long-term changes in structure and process in complex communities. The thread that connects his research is his underlying interest in distributed governance: how to coexist to mutual benefit when control is not centralized but immanent throughout the community.

He completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Princeton University in 2003, focusing on evolution and ecology.

From 2003 through 2005 he worked with Alan Hastings and Louis Botsford at UC Davis, on the population biology of age-structured Pacific salmon species. From 2005 through 2007, he was a Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, working on research related to self-organization and sustainability.

Currently (as of 2011) he is a postdoc with Jonathan Dushoff's team at McMaster University, studying social norms and dynamics of HIV transmission in Africa.

He is also the author of WorkingWiki, an extension to the widely-used MediaWiki software package that makes it into a platform for managing research data together with the software scripts that process the data, simulation software, the figures made from the software's output, and the papers that include the figures.

He continues to pursue research on dynamics of consensus formation as well (see proposal), and ongoing work on older projects.

Links

More information is available at http://leeworden.net:

• Publications
• Curriculum Vitae
• Open Lab Notebook
• Consensus dynamics research proposal