Mikhail Tikhonov, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, won a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation for his project, “Harnessing emergent simplicity for high-precision predictions in high-diversity ecosystems.” The highly sought-after award is reserved for early-career faculty who successfully combine research with mentoring and education.
The grant will support Tikhonov’s efforts to describe microbial ecosystems using the concepts of statistical physics. He will work with extensive datasets collected by microbial ecologists at the University of Chicago. “Some ecosystems appear to be surprisingly ‘coarse-grainable,’ meaning that simple models can predict complex properties,” Tikhonov said. “We want to understand when this happens and why.”
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