Postdoctoral Research Fellow · University of Vermont
I study phase transitions in complex adaptive systems — in living matter, and in markets.
Evolutionary computation, artificial life, and the language-driven control of living and embodied systems. The same question runs through everything I build: how does coherent, adaptive behaviour arise from parts that have no plan — and once it has arisen, can we steer it?
One question, two substrates
A flock of cells and a market are both collectives of parts that adapt to one another without a plan. In both, the interesting events are not the averages but the transitions — the moment a population commits to a new organisation, the moment a regime turns over. My work is about characterising those transitions well enough to detect them, and in the case of living matter, well enough to cause them.
The methods travel between the two: evolutionary computation, dynamical-systems analysis, and — more recently — foundation models used not as oracles but as interfaces, translating human intent into interventions on a system that has no notion of what we want.
Living matter
Prompt-to-Intervention turns a free-form English sentence into a bioelectric intervention on a cellular collective. Sentence embeddings drive an evolved policy network; the reward is supplied by a vision–language model reading the outcome, so no behaviour has to be hand-specified in advance. It is the first demonstration of steering emergent cellular dynamics from language alone.
Markets
A market is a collective that reorganises without anyone deciding to. Theta treats it that way: it locates an instrument in a phase space, names the regime it is in, and says whether that regime is building or breaking — across several timeframes at once, resolved jointly rather than reconciled by eye. Built and running as three production platforms.
Selected work
Neural agents self-organise into flocks that divide — an evolutionary transition in individuality, arrived at without being asked for.
Northeast Journal of Complex Systems
The LaSER approach: let the program describe the representation and let a learner do the fitting.
GPTP · arXiv:2505.17309
Evolving prompt-to-intervention models for cellular control.
GECCO Companion, ACM