Publications

My publications explore three broad questions: How do people move through cities? Why do cities grow and change? And how do individual choices produce group behavior? I have authored more than 35 peer-reviewed research papers, including more than 25 as first author. The featured summaries below explain several key results in plain language; the complete lists retain the original article titles for readers who want the technical record.

For citation metrics and the most current record, visit my Google Scholar profile.

Featured work

npj Complexity · 2026

Towards universal urban patterns-of-life simulation

A computer simulation that creates realistic daily schedules for virtual people and can represent the full population of a metropolitan area—more than 20 million people at once.

Role: First and corresponding author

Nature Cities · 2025

Domestic migration and city rank dynamics

Shows that unusually large migration shifts affect smaller cities most strongly, while larger cities are generally more stable because they draw growth from several sources.

Role: First author

Nature Communications · 2022

Spatial structure of city population growth

Reveals how moves within and between cities produce uneven population growth and push urban expansion outward from dense centers.

Role: First author

Computers, Environment and Urban Systems · 2025

Function and form of US cities

Compares how people travel with how roads are arranged across 52 metropolitan areas, finding that very different cities can share similar daily activity patterns.

Role: First author

Physics of Life Reviews · 2019

Agent-based models of collective intelligence

Explains how groups of people—or virtual decision-makers in a computer model—can share information and cooperate to solve difficult problems.

Role: First author

npj Urban Sustainability · 2022

Modeling the dynamics and spatial heterogeneity of city growth

A mathematical model showing how migration helps produce very different population paths across cities and across neighborhoods within the same city.

Role: First author

Urban systems, mobility, and the built environment

• Towards universal urban patterns-of-life simulation. npj Complexity (2026).
• UrbanLLMind: Scalable LLM-powered urban mobility simulation with open-weight models. Conference on Language Modeling—COLM (2026).
• Opportunities and challenges of LLMs in urban science. Physics of Life Reviews (2025).
• Function and form of US cities. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (2025).
• Domestic migration and city rank dynamics. Nature Cities (2025).
• An OpenStreetMap derived building classification dataset for the United States. Scientific Data (2024).
• An agent-based model of post-disaster recovery in multilayer socio-physical networks. Sustainable Cities and Society (2024).
• Modeling the dynamics and spatial heterogeneity of city growth. npj Urban Sustainability (2022).
• Spatial structure of city population growth. Nature Communications (2022).

Collective behavior and complex systems

• Agent mobility and hotspot adaptability drive group aggregation. Physica A (2025).
• Communication patterns affect the collective performance of social agents. The European Physical Journal B (2025).
• Group size matters: Synergistic effects and reduced inequality in performance rankings. Physica A (2025).
• Science of Science: A Complex Network Perspective. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (2025).
• Cultural heterogeneity constrains diffusion of innovations. EPL (2023).
• Long-term scientific impact revisited. The European Physical Journal Plus (2022).
• A SIR epidemic model for citation dynamics. The European Physical Journal Plus (2021).
• Wisdom of crowds: Much ado about nothing. Journal of Statistical Mechanics (2021).
• The surprising little effectiveness of cooperative algorithms in parallel problem solving. The European Physical Journal B (2020).
• Policies for allocation of information in task-oriented groups. The European Physical Journal B (2019).
• Individual decision making in task-oriented groups. The European Physical Journal B (2019).
• Mobility helps problem-solving systems to avoid groupthink. Physical Review E (2019).
• Agent-based models of collective intelligence. Physics of Life Reviews (2019).
• Impact of centrality on cooperative processes. Physical Review E (2017).
• Effect of group organization on the performance of cooperative processes. Ecological Complexity (2017).

Statistical physics and computational methods

• Nonequilibrium phase transition and cultural drift in the continuous-trait Axelrod model. Physical Review E (2025).
• Finding contrasting patterns in rhythmic properties between prose and poetry. Physica A (2022).
• Analysis of statistical correlations between properties of adaptive walks in fitness landscapes. Royal Society Open Science (2020).
• Diffusion of innovations in Axelrod’s model on small-world networks. International Journal of Modern Physics C (2020).
• Comfort-driven mobility produces spatial fragmentation in Axelrod’s model. Journal of Statistical Mechanics (2020).
• Species differentiation in Axelrod’s model. International Journal of Modern Physics C (2019).
• Effect of long-range interactions on the phase transition of Axelrod’s model. Physical Review E (2016).
• Persistent agents in Axelrod’s social dynamics model. EPL (2016).
• Activity of a social dynamics model. Physica A (2015).
• Nonsynchronous updating in the multiverse of cellular automata. Physical Review E (2015).
• Conway’s Game of Life is a near-critical metastable state in the multiverse of cellular automata. Physical Review E (2014).

Publication counts and citation metrics change over time. See Google Scholar for the latest values and my CV for full authorship details.