Dr. Sitabhra Sinha
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Contact Address:
Institute of Mathematical Sciences
C. I. T. Campus, Taramani, Chennai 600 113
INDIA
Tel: +91-44-22543301
Fax: +91-44-22541586
E-mail: sitabhra[at]imsc.res.in
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KITP, UCSB, 2003
Hi ! Welcome to my page.
I am a Professor in the Physics group of the Institute of
Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) at Chennai (formerly known as Madras), and
adjunct faculty of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS),
Bangalore.
My Ph.D. work was on the nonlinear
dynamics of recurrent neural network models done at the Machine Intelligence
Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (1994-1998).
I did postdoctoral
research on nonlinear dynamics of spatially extended systems with
focus on biological systems at the Department of Physics,
Indian Institute of Science at
Bangalore (1998-2000 and 2001-2002) and Weill Medical College of Cornell
University at New York City (2000-2001). I joined the faculty of
IMSc in September 2002.
My areas of research fall broadly under complex
systems, nonlinear dynamics and theoretical & computational biophysics.
Particular topics in which I am currently working include:
- Physics of cardiac arrhythmias - explaining the origin of and devising
efficient control methods for abnormal
life-threatening disturbances in the rhythm of the heart (e.g.,
tachycardia and fibrillation) -
spatio-temporal dynamics of
spiral waves and spiral turbulence in excitable media - dynamical
pattern formation
in biological cells and tissue (e.g., periodic contractions in the uterus)
- Network dynamics - role of mesoscopic organization, viz., modularity
and hierarchy -
stability vs. complexity issues in structured
networks with applications to biology and
ecology - eigenvalue statistics of non-hermitian random matrices
- non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of community assembly models
- Systems biology - Intra-cellular signaling networks and their role in
host-pathogen interaction during infection - statistical analysis of
epidemiological data - modeling the spread of infectious diseases through
contact networks in a population
- Computational Neuroscience - modeling the entire nervous system of
C. elegans to understand the behavior of the organism
as an emergent dynamical phenomenon - meso-scale models of the dynamics in
cortical areas of the brain - application
of neurodynamical chaos to information storage and processing -
modelling low-level visual processing
in the retina
- Physics of social and economic phenomena - genesis of scaling behavior
(e.g., Pareto law of wealth and income distribution, "inverse cubic law"
of stock price fluctuations in financial markets, etc.) in economics -
emergence of popularity through self-organization in a population of agents -
phase transitions in
collective (or social) choice relevant to financial markets,
movie revenue distribution and electoral behavior
- Emergence of computational complexity in cellular automata and
related systems - Phase transition in SAT-like problems
- Stochastic resonance, critical behavior and hysteresis in simple
maps arising in biological contexts
For more details about my research interests, please click on the
relevant links in the frame at the left of this page or look under
my publications.