Projects

Evolutionary game theory and applications

How a population develops and evolves in a given time period of interest is a fundamental research subject in evolutionary biology and ecology, with applications in many other fields of biology, medicine, and social sciences, ranging from virus infection to bacteria development, from genetic disorder to cancer evolution, from plant succession to animal breeding, and from human behaviors to cultural changes.

Social distancing games

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I started working on the collective behavior of social distancing for epidemic prevention. I model the distancing behavior as a population game where every individual makes decision for how to participate in various social activities, to keep some of them while avoiding some others, to reduce close social contacts with minimal social or economic costs. The game is assumed to reach an equilibrium state when every individual finds an optimal distancing strategy and the population is distributed over the social activities with balanced social, economic, as well as health benefits.

Language games

Another line of my work on social behaviors is in the emerging field of research on language dynamics or language evolution. A critical research subject in this field is on the dynamics of language death. For in recent years there have been many world languages disappearing due to rapid cultural mixes or changes. In 2003, Abrams and Strogatz proposed a mathematical model on the dynamics of language death and sparked years of research on this subject in mathematical and physical sciences. 

Social network games

This project is concerned with the problem of how a population of biological or social species spreads or evolves in a given social network. For example, a wide range of human diseases spread through networks of possible transmission routes; news or rumors circulate among linked social sites on the internet; immediate relatives or friends influence each other on opinions or beliefs; companies purchase and sell products through trade partnerships. All these activities, biological or social, can be considered as an evolutionary process of a population over a given social network, and be modeled as an evolutionary game called social network game.

Social cooperation games

Evolution of cooperation of biological species is an important research subject in evolutionary biology and ecology. Evolutionary game theory has been used as a tool for modeling and simulation of evolution of social cooperation. We have studied a lab developed population of two yeast strains, cooperator and cheater strains, and investigated the nature of the game played by the yeast and how cooperation is maintained and under what conditions.

Genetic selection games

An allele is one of several possible forms of a gene. Most of multi-cellular organisms are diploid, i.e., their chromosomes form homologous pairs. Each pair of chromosomes has a pair of alleles at each genetic locus. Thus, n different alleles may form n square different allele pairs, as two alleles in each pair may not be the same. Different allele pairs are considered to be different genotypes, which may result in different phenotypes or in other words, different genetic traits.