About

Associate Professor of Computer Science at The University of Vermont's Complex Systems Center.

Professeur associé au Département de physique, de génie physique et d'optique de l'Université Laval.

Principal Investigator of Open-source Complex Ecosystems And Networks.

co-Director at the the Translational Global Infectious diseases Research Center.

Director of The Complex Networks Winter Workshop.

Board member of The Network Science Society.

Research in Complexity, Network Theory, and Nonlinear Dynamics in Epidemiology/Biology/Sociology/Ecology

Full CV available here (pdf).

News

• Mar 3, 2021

  APS Outstanding Referee Award

  

  I was awarded with a lifetime appointment to the American Physical Society’s Outstanding Referees program. This is an incredible honor. I am also proud to be the first awardee from the University of Vermont!

• Jan 21, 2021

  Virtual CNWW, and real new projects

  Our team led by the great Juniper Lovato recently wrapped up our Virtual Complex Network Winter Workshop (or CNWW) which I thought was an amazing experience. One of our participant collected a summary of the projects on Twitter. Speaking of collaborations and teamwork, we are also looking to the future: Our OCEAN project is now focusing on attribution of contributions in open source projects (see our piece in Nature Computational Science) as well as distributing funding to related projects. Exciting times ahead!

• Oct 13, 2020

  $4M for the impacts of climate change on rural communities

  Our joint team with researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Maine was awarded a $4 million project over fours year. The team will develop a spatiotemporal dataset and modeling framework to understand shifts in species range due to climate change, as well as the impacts on rural communities through changes in infectious diseases, pests and local climate. “Communities adapt when they face public crises like climate change or infectious diseases,” Hébert-Dufresne said. “Solving climate change and infectious diseases will involve bottom-up behavior changes and innovations, not just top-down policies.”

• Sep 26, 2020

  NetSci 2020

  The NetSci 2020 conference wrapped up yesterday. Our Laboratory for Structure & Dynamics (LSD) was well represented with posters by Mariah Boudreau (sensitivity of probability generating functions) and Sam Rosenblatt (improved acquaintance immunization), presentations by Jean-Gabriel Young (higher-order networks), Guillaume St-Onge (seeding complex contagions) and Alexander Daniels (network comparison and embedding). We even had a poster on the network structure of hockey fights, work from our Complex Network Winter Workshop 2019! A good year despite the terrible situation.

• Feb 26, 2020

  Interacting Contagions

  New paper out this week in Nature Physics: Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement. We show how models of social contagions could provide effective ways to map and understand the complex dynamics of interacting contagions. Otherwise, we always model outbreaks in a vacuum even when we know most diseases interact directly (biologically, within host) and indirectly (finite resources for treatment and intervention). In the past, coupling models of contagions has given us models whose complexity explodes exponentially, but social contagion as an effective model could fix that. There is a lot more work needed in this area, which is arguably the next big paradigm shift needed in disease modelling. Stay tuned.

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