Nicholas Landry
I’m an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia (as well as a courtesy faculty member in the School of Data Science) and I lead an interdisciplinary lab studying how networks and groups (higher-order interactions) affect the spread of diseases, information, and opinions. I use tools from network science, mathematical modeling, Bayesian inference, and open-source software.
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
- June 2025: I attended NetSci 2025 in Maastricht, NL, where I organized the Software and Data for Supporting Network Science satellite workshop and presented work on sampling from the hypergraph configuration model. I also handed off the Zachary Karate Club award to Arash Badie-Modiri. A photo of the hand-off.
- May 2025: New preprint on the arXiv! “A Blue Start: A large-scale pairwise and higher-order social network dataset” in collaboration with Alyssa Smith, Ilya Amburg, Sagar Kumar, and Brooke Foucault Welles!
- May 2025: I taught “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! I also gave a talk on “Opinion disparity in hypergraphs with community structure: theory and practice”.
- May 2025: “Governance as a complex, networked, democratic, satisfiability problem” is now published in npj Complexity!
- April 2025: I was an invited panelist at the Social Contagions, Artificial Intelligence, and Democracy Workshop at UVA.
- March 2025: I presented our paper “Governance as a complex, networked, democratic, satisfiability problem” at the APS Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, CA.
- March 2025: I gave a talk at the Bryn Mawr Bi-Co Math Colloquium.
- February 2025: I gave the UVA Statistics Colloquium talk about network reconstruction from data.
- January 2024: I became a courtesy faculty member in the School of Data Science! This will foster many exciting cross-school collaborations.
- December 2024: New preprint on the structure of effective governance is now posted!
- November 2024: I gave 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!
