Dr Brennen Fagan

Profile

Biography

I received my undergraduate degree at California State University, Fresno, with the Smittcamp Family Honors College before coming to the University of York’s Department of Mathematics for a PhD in Mathematical Modelling on a departmental teaching studentship.

My PhD work was with the York Historical Warfare Analysis Group, where we examined and modelled historical war data to better understand human conflict. This also resulted in a book on Quantifying Counterfactual Military History.

I currently work with the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity on mathematically modelling changes and trends in biodiversity and related interdisciplinary projects.

My primary project focuses on how biodiversity reflects the movement of species and underlying communities.

Research

Overview

My current research focuses on how biodiversity represents and reflects the underlying ecosystem using mathematical modelling and on interdisciplinary working in this area.

My main strand uses dynamical systems and simulations to examine the effects of human actions on the final detected biodiversity of the system. My collaborators and I have also used these and related ideas to investigate human evolution, land-use, and conflict.

My mathematical interests lie primarily in the fields of computational mathematics, dynamical systems, and data analysis. Broadly, this includes applications of mathematics and statistics, including graph theory, game theory, time series, and causality.

Research group(s)

• Mathematical Biology and Chemistry Research Group
• York Historical Warfare Analysis Group