Virginia Tech Kids' Tech University March session

“How Much Work Could a Network Net if a Network Could Net Work?”

An interactive session led by Dr. Stephen Eubank

Deputy Director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and a Virginia Tech Adjunct Professor of Physics

Every day, we have to deal with dozens of networks, from natural ones like spider webs to man-made ones like road networks, telephone networks, and the world-wide web. What is it about networks that makes them a solution for so many different problems? How can we design networks so they'll do the things we want them to do – like let us make a phone call to the other side of the world – and not do things we don't want them to do – like spread a virus? We'll start by describing networks as mathematical objects so that we can think about them in precise ways. Then we'll look for patterns in the kinds of things that can happen on networks and how they're related to the way the network is put together. Along the way, we'll take detours and short cuts through the networks of science, mathematics, and computing.

Dr. Stephen Eubank is the Deputy Director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and a Virginia Tech Adjunct Professor of Physics. Dr. Eubank’s research and training program centers on detailed mathematical modeling and computer simulation of biological systems. Two principle areas of interest are population-level infectious disease epidemiology and cellular-level immunology. For both of these, he and his collaborators are integrating knowledge from diverse areas of biology and sociology into high-performance-computing enabled simulations with tens of millions of interacting agents.