Distinguished lecture series on network science and research

In light of the growing interest and importance of network science and network research to the Penn State Research community, the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research is sponsoring a Distinguished Lecture Series on Network Science and Research this academic year. Throughout this lecture series, prominent national experts will be invited to campus to present cutting-edge work on network science and network research. The goal of the lecture series will be to clarify the underlying principles in this intrinsically interdisciplinary research area and to bring the diverse community of Penn State researchers together around common themes to explore how their research might benefit from intellectual cross-fertilization.

Networks are everywhere. From computers on the Internet to infected patients in an epidemic to molecular processes within a cell, complex webs of interactions between many different entities play critical roles in both society and the natural world. Such networks are at the heart of an increasing number of research efforts at Penn State across many colleges and fields of study, either as the subject of research themselves or as an essential characteristic of a particular phenomenon.
Many Penn State faculty have research programs that centrally involve networks. Examples of such research programs include:

-- Faculty in the Colleges of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Agricultural Sciences who apply network theory to understand the evolution and structure of river basins, or who use wireless sensor networks for environmental observation.

-- Faculty in the Eberly College of Science and the College of Engineering study networks in various biological systems including signaling networks both at the cellular and organismic scale as well as network models to explore the spatio-temporal dynamics of infectious disease and how they are affected by control strategies.

-- Faculty in the Colleges of Engineering and Information Science and Technology study networks of sensors and data fusion as well as many different aspects of computational networks with especially strong expertise in network security and information assurance.

-- Faculty in the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Information Science and Technology, Business, and Health and Human Development who study many aspects of social networks including message diffusion and how adolescent social networks either inhibit or contribute to individual criminal behaviors.

-- Faculty in the Smeal College of Business and the College of Engineering study networks relevant to supply chains and network evolution inside and across organizations, including both cooperative and competitive networks in the manufacturing and service industries.

A number of speakers have been confirmed for the series including: Luis A.N. Amaral, Northwestern University; James Moody, Duke University; Mark Newman, University of Michigan; Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe, Princeton University; Duncan Watts, Yahoo!; and Columbia University; and Kathleen Carley, Carnegie Mellon University. The first one,Nathan Eagle of MIT and Sante Fe University, will give his presentation Nov. 5. The time and location will be announced later. Specifics on the seminars will be available at http://www.research.psu.edu.

For information on the Network Science Seminar Series, contact Lesley Moore at ljm32@psu.edu or (814) 863-9658.