Zoltán Toroczkai Receives Alfred Renyi Institute of Mathematics Fellowship

Zoltan Toroczkai, a professor of Physics, has received a fellowship to study for two months this summer at the Alfred Renyi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The fellowship is sponsored by the Hungarian Bioinformatics Marie Curie Host Fellowships program, financed by the European Union.

Toroczkai's current research is on fundamental properties of large-scale networks, in particular social networks, using database of cell-phone call trace-logs, with the callers' identities concealed, to infer statistical patterns of social dynamics. Major sporting events or breaking news, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack, can cause visible changes in those patterns, the study indicates. That provides valuable information about how the social network responds as a whole, in case of disasters or global emergencies and could help develop mitigation strategies.

Toroczkai has also been involved in a nine-year, $30 million study at Los Alamos National Laboratory that studied the influence of social contact networks on disease spread. By using extended census data complemented by mobility diaries kept by thousands of people, an in-silico, virtual model of a city and its population was developed allowing to draft detailed quarantine and vaccination strategies in case of a smallpox outbreak, as it was partially presented in a 2004 Nature publication, by this group. The study has applications to present concerns about the spread of swine flu.

The fellowship will enhance both his own research and Notre Dame’s relationship with the institute in Budapest, Toroczkai says. “This is a great opportunity for me since this institute is considered the Mecca of discrete mathematics in general and combinatorics and graph theory in particular,” he says. “As my research is in network science and it applications, graph theory and discrete mathematics are essential elements of it, and interacting with some of the most renowned experts in these fields will greatly benefit our research and spark new collaborations between the Interdisciplinary Center of Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA) at Notre Dame and the Renyi Institute.”