Welcome to Matt Ricci's webpage. I study living dynamical systems, from the genetic to the ecological levels. I use methods from mathematics, physics and data science to understand how and why these systems undergo qualitative changes in behavior, structure and function. Currently, I am a postdoc at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I have worked as a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Mor Nitzan. Earlier, I completed my doctoral studies as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Brown University, where I studied machine learning and computational neuroscience with Thomas Serre and Stuart Geman.
Research
Discovering bifurcations in spatiotemporal data
Spatiotemporal dynamics pervade the biological sciences, from the morphogen dynamics underlying patterning in animal pigmentation to the protein waves controlling cell division. An ongoing scientific challenge lies in understanding how system parameters relate to qualitative changes in system behavior called bifurcations. This challenge is made particularly difficult in realistic settings where governing PDEs are unknown and data is limited.
The research aims of this project are both practical and theoretical. First, we wish to build computational tools to infer the bifurcation structure of real spatiotemporal data in biology. Second, we want to understand mathematically which measurements are minimally necessary for detecting different classes of bifurcations.
Other research directions*:
Hopf bifurcations in temporal data
How do we predict the emergence of oscillations in an equation-free manner? [Github]
Universal dynamical embeddings
Can we learn a universal feature dictionary for the classification and design of dynamical systems? [Github]
Adaptive network dynamics
How do we connect agents in a network to achieve an optimal dynamics? [Github]
* This research was conducted in collaboration with my excellent colleagues, advisors and friends: Mor Nitzan, Thomas Serre, Rufin van Rullen, Noa Moriel, Zoe Piran, and Mathieu Chalvidal.