Nicholas Landry
I’m a new Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia. I’m starting an interdisciplinary lab focused on understanding how networks and groups (higher-order interactions) affect the spread of diseases, information, and opinions. I’ll be answering these types of questions using tools from network science, mathematical modeling, Bayesian inference, and open-source software. I’m hoping to build bridges between the Biology department, the Biocomplexity Institute, the Quantitative Collaborative, and the School of Data Science, among others.
I’m hiring a postdoc! Apply at UVA Jobs!
My portfolio is a collection of some projects that I’ve worked on personally, professionally, and academically. For more about me, see my bio, CV, or list of publications. You can also take a look at my blog.
Research Interests
- The structure and dynamics of complex systems (particularly those involving higher-order interactions)
- Contagion spread (disease, opinions, etc.)
- Inference of network structure
- Open software
Recent News
- May 2025: I will be teaching “A Practical Guide to Modeling with Higher-order Networks” with Laurent Hébert-Dufresne as a minitutorial at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS25) in Denver, CO!
- November 2024: I will be giving a talk in the Statistics Department at Grinnell College.
- October 2024: I chatted with the Quantum Photonics Club on Clubhouse about my work on “Reconstructing networks from simple and complex contagions”. Listen to it here.
- October 2024: I gave a talk at the “Spreading on social networks – theory and applications” workshop at Rutgers University. Here are photos of my talk and the group photo.
- October 2024: “Reconstructing networks from simple and complex contagions” has been published as a letter in Physical Review E!
- August 2024: Two new preprints were posted: one presenting a theoretical model of a physical reservoir computer and the other presenting a new method for efficiently and accurately simulating diffusion processes with a high degree of stochasticity.
- August 2024: I started as an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia!
- July 2024: I moved from Burlington, VT to Charlottesville, VA!
- June 2024: I was at NetSci in Quebec City and talked about my recent work on network reconstruction and about XGI at the Software Tools for Network Science satellite. My talk on network reconstruction won the Zachary’s Karate Club Trophy. Here are photos of my talk referencing the ZKC network and of the trophy presentation.
- May 2024: Yifei (Bell) Luo, an undergraduate at Middlebury College, co-mentored by Phil Chodrow and me, presented his undergraduate thesis titled “Efficient sampling of configuration model random hypergraphs”! Very proud of him!
- April 2024: I accepted an offer as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia, as an interdisciplinary hire through the Contagion Science program! I will start in August 2024 and will be looking for a postdoc and several PhD students, so stay tuned!
- April 2024: Joint work with Will Thompson, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, and Jean-Gabriel Young titled “Reconstructing networks from simple and complex contagions” is now on ArXiv!
- April 2024: I was an invited speaker at the WINQ Program on Complex and Quantum Systems workshop in Stockholm, Sweden!
- April 2024: I gave a talk at the Interaction Data Lab at LPI Paris on the limitations of models and measures for capturing higher-order structure.
- March 2024: Joint work with Nicole Eikmeier and Jean-Gabriel Young titled “The simpliciality of higher-order networks” was published in EPJ Data Science!
- March 2024: I taught a GNSP topic course on networks with higher-order interactions at the APS March Meeting, along with Ginestra Bianconi and Baruch Barzel. The materials are located on Github.
- February 2024: Joint work with Ilya Amburg, Mirah Shi, and Sinan Aksoy titled “Filtering higher-order datasets” was published in the Journal of Physics: Complexity!
- December 2023: I will be attending the Complex Networks Winter Workshop (CNWW, pronounced “canoe”) in Quebec City, QC!
- November 2023: XGI-DATA is relaunched on Zenodo with twice as many datasets and now has a corresponding table of network statistics!