Dr. Colin Twomey

Biography

Colin Twomey is the Executive Director of the Data Driven Discovery Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads research and education in data science within the School of Arts and Sciences. He is the founder and director of the University Atlas project, which aims to map the research landscape at Penn. Colin began as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Joshua Plotkin on inference in cultural evolution, following his Ph.D. in collective behavior under Iain Couzin at Princeton University. His undergraduate studies in computer science were at Colgate University, where he was a Goldwater Scholar. He has also contributed to combinatorial optimization as a Fulbright Fellow at Université Libre de Bruxelles. In the industry, Colin has experience as a software developer at Sun Microsystems and as a data science consultant for the World Bank as well as for an agtech startup, Arable Labs. His research explores the natural algorithms guiding collective behaviors, the influence of sensory systems on decision-making in groups, and the dynamics of consensus within animal groups, utilizing both theoretical and computational approaches.

Research Interests