Bio Brief

Thilo Gross is a network and complexity scientist. Once a physicist, he has moved on to become a Reader in Mathematics at Bristol, Full Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis, and now professor for Biodiversity Theory at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB).

His work focusses on the question how complex systems become simple, which he studies across various disciplines. He developed the Generalized Modelling, coined the name of Adaptive Networks, and proposed a method for trait identification in biodiversity assessment.

He is presently Vice President of the Network Science Society, NetSci, and a Senator of the University of Oldenburg.

Extended Version

Thilo Gross is a Network and Complexity Scientist. He studied Physics in Oldenburg and Portsmouth, before receiving a PhD in natural sciences from the University of Oldenburg. After post-doctoral work at the University of Potsdam, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Princeton University as a visiting research fellow. He subsequently became a Research Group Leader at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. He was then appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where he was promoted to Reader the following year. Thereafter he became tenured Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis.

Eventually Thilo returned back to the place where it all began—the University of Oldenburg—where he is Professor of Biodiversity Theory, while also leading the Biodiversity Theory group at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), which is part of the Alfred-Wegener Institute, the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research.

Thilo is know for the development of the Generalized Modelling method, which is also known as Structural Kinetic Modelling. He coined the name of Adaptive Networks, for systems where the structure of a network co-evolves with the dynamics, which is now a major field of network science research. Furthermore he popularized the use of diffusion maps for trait reconstruction in Biodiversity theory.

Throughout his career Thilo has worked across disciplines, publishing in disciplinary journals of at least six different disciplines and some interdisciplinary ones. His work has consistently anticipated devlopments in Science, pioneering adaptive networks at a time when network science was largely structural, analyzing the affect of social distancing in epidemics in 2005, and studying echo chambers in social networks in 2010, long before the post-truth crisis.

Presently Thilo works on a wide range of topics including the quantification of biodiversity, percolation processes in networks, mutualistic host-symbiont networks, food webs and met-communities, epidemics, opinion formation, and foundations of complexity science.

Thilo is presently vice-president of NetSci, the international society of network scientists, principal investigator of the Excellence Cluster “Ocean Floor” and Senator of the University of Oldenburg.