Dr. Alexander Strang

Biography

Alexander Strang is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Case Western Reserve University, which he obtained in 2020. Before his current role, he served as a Kruskal Instructor at the University of Chicago until 2023, where he was recognized with the Suzuki Prize for outstanding postdoctoral work. His research is strongly interdisciplinary, focusing on the intersection of statistical physics, spectral graph theory, optimization, and mathematical biology. Strang has developed optimization algorithms and hierarchical Bayesian models that promote sparsity and has researched self-organization mechanisms in evolving networks and populations. He leverages spectral characterization in game theory to analyze decision-making problems and has introduced moment closure bounds based on algebraic geometry. His work includes analyzing early warning signals in noisy dynamical systems and applying simplicial cohomology to stochastic processes near equilibrium. Strang's interests lie in understanding the interplay between structure and dynamics in complex networks.

Research Interests