About Wout

I’m a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Physics and the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena at the University of Amsterdam. My research interests are statistical mechanics of complex systems, networks, (quantum) information theory, and stochastic modeling in epidemiology, ecology, sociology and economic game theory.

An important part of my research revolves around building bridges between different scientific disciplines. This manifests itself practically through the importation of numerical and theoretical methods from quantum many-body systems to stochastic models of complex systems with network interactions. Most notably, I’m using tensor networks to efficiently represent large probability distributions of both in and out-of-equilibrium systems. This has important applications in understanding large deviations in epidemic models; defining the complexity of cellular automata; and efficient sampling from spin models with higher-order interactions.