Brennen Fagan

Postdoctoral Research Associate,
Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity

Mathematics of Biodiversity Change

brennen.fagan@york.ac.uk

Biography

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate with LCAB and the Department of Mathematics studying the Mathematics of Biodiversity Change.

I received my undergraduate degree at California State University, Fresno with the Smittcamp Family Honors College and my PhD in Mathematics from the University of York on a departmental teaching studentship. My PhD studied historical war data with the York Historical Warfare Analysis Group to better understand human conflict.

Working with LCAB means interdisciplinary collaboration on global problems: how do we enhance biodiversity and prevent its loss? Being a part means seeing these problems from multiple perspectives and generating new insights.

Research

My research leans towards applied computational mathematics, primarily simulations, dynamical systems, and data analysis. This has ranged from understanding historical decision-making through bootstraps and counterfactual analysis (collaboration with Dr Horwood and Dr Price, York St John) and understanding how the time series of war-level battle deaths has changed using changepoint analysis (Dr Knight, York) to studying the physics and robustness of coalescence and fragmentation systems (Dr Pushkin, York) during my PhD (Professor MacKay and Professor Wood).

My main project studies how dispersal interacts with community assembly to impact biodiversity, in collaboration with Professor Jon Pitchford, Professor Susan Stepney, and Professor Chris Thomas. I additionally am working with Jonathan Gordon on analysing the historical pollen record as well as Dr George Constable and Professor Richard Law on the mathematics of inheritance of the gut microbiome. In my spare time, Dr Tadhg Carroll, Dr Jack Hatfield, and I lead an informal, internal Bayesian Statistics workshop.

Publication highlights

Fagan, B.T., MacKay, N.J., Pushkin, D.O. and Wood, A.J. (2021). Stochastic gel-shatter cycles in coalescence-fragmentation models. Europhysics Letters, 133(5).

Fagan, B.T., Knight, M.I., MacKay, N.J. and Wood, A.J. (2020). Change point analysis of historical battle deaths. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 183 (3), pp. 909 –933.

Fagan, B.T., Horwood, I., MacKay, N., Price, C., Richards, E., and Wood, A.J. (2020). Bootstrapping the Battle of Britain. 84 (1), pp. 151 – 86. Available upon request. 

Funder

• The Leverhulme Trust