My work

What I do

I am interested in many areas of science, including ecology, epidemiology, economy, sociology, cell biology, and history. Of course I am not really an expert in most of these disciplines, so what I do is to apply what I know about mathematics and modeling to questions that have been indentified by specialists in these disciplines.

Most of my work is based on the application of techniques from nonlinear dynamics. This branch of mathematics, offers a large arsenal of powerful tools, which can be used to find out how a given complex systems works?

One problem of nonlinear dynamics is that it can only be applied to certain classes of systems. My work focuses on pushing these boundaries in order to formulate questions that arise in applications such that they can be addressed by existing mathematical tools. I do this by finiding suitable approximations and modeling techniques. This approach and the way I talk and think about problems is deeply rooted in theoretical physics. So, while I apply mathematics to a wide range of disciplines I am really a physicist.

My group

Much more information on my work can be found on my group homepage.

I am very proud on my group, Dynamics of complex networks at the MPI-PKS, the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. I would have to reduce the range of my activities considerably without the help of many clever people. In particular I have to Thank Lars Rudolf who, as a staff scientist, keeps everything running; the PhD candidates (not students!) who do most of the work; and the visiting scientists who greatly enrich our work by their expertise. (Thank you all for your great work!)

Selected Publications

Some of my publications are listed below. A complete list of my scientific papers can be found here.

T. Gross, L. Rudolf, S. A. Levin, and U. Dieckmann: Generalized models reveal stabilizing factors in food webs
Science 325, 747-750, 2009. abstract

T. Gross and H. Sayama (Eds.): Adptive Networks: Theory, Models and Applications
Springer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009. contents

T. Gross and B. Blasius: Adaptive coevolutionary networks: a review
Journal of the Royal Society -- Interface 5, 259-271, 2008. abstract

R. Steuer, T. Gross, J. Selbig, and B. Blasius: Structural kinetic modelling of metabolic networks
PNAS 103(32), 11868-11874, 2006. abstract

T. Gross, C. Dommar D'Lima, and B. Blasius: Epidemic dynamics on an adaptive network
Physical Review Letters 96, 208701-4, 2006. abstract