GOTHAM lab

⌛ Last hours for the early bird registration!!!

Dont miss it 👇

A grid of images showing SocioPatterns wearable devices, collaborators of the project, proximity graphs, and deployments in museums, hospitals, villages.

Long overdue refresh of the SocioPatterns website! ✨ sociopatterns.org New content & datasets, and a chance to celebrate 17+ years of collabs, ~100 publications, 2000+ studies using our data. Thanks – more ahead! @alainbarrat.bsky.social @wouter-vdb.bsky.social @foolsdelight.bsky.social @isi.it

6/6 Thanks to all the collaborators in this project:

Hugo Pérez, @santiagolaot.bsky.social @federicomalizia.bsky.social, Luis Mario Floria, @gomezgardenes.bsky.social & @sorianopanos.bsky.social

More info at: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

5/6 But the microscopic organization is also important.

Hyperedge overlap promotes polarization, as it reduces exposure to different opinions and reinforces local consensus 🤝

4/6 This effect is structural.

As higher-order interactions become denser, agents increasingly participate in heterogeneous groups, which suppress polarization and promote moderation.

We also show this analytically!

3/6 The key result is that sparse higher-order interactions promote polarization.

When group interactions are sparse, agents are often embedded in homogeneous groups, limiting exposure to dissent and reinforcing extreme views.

2/6 Most opinion-dynamics models rely on pairwise interactions 👭+👬+👫+....

However, opinion formation often happens in groups:
👥👥👥👥👥👥+👥👥👥👥👥👥+👥👥👥👥+... where discussions can reinforce or moderate views.

This demands a higher-order framework to explicitly capture group interactions and homophily.

1/6 And another article out in @commsphys.nature.com

Sparse group interactions polarize…but dense group interactions moderate!!

Polarization emerges as a structural effect of how groups are organized: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

7/7 Thanks to all the collaborators in this project:

@santiagolaot.bsky.social , Octavian Rotita, Alex Arenas, @sorianopanos.bsky.social & @gomezgardenes.bsky.social

More info at:
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

and... stay tuned, more to come 😉 !!!

6/7 Strikingly, the model partially reconstructs empirical epidemic trajectories, recovering the temporal ordering of strain emergence observed in genomic surveillance.

Overall, epidemic dynamics 📈 depend crucially on the topology of genotype networks, beyond low-dimensional antigenic descriptions.

5/7 We then apply the model to Influenza A (H3N2). Its modular genotype network naturally produces:

☑️ lineage turnover
☑️ competition between multiple strains

4/7 The key result is that network topology alone controls the endemic behavior:

▶️ Homogeneous networks → stable equilibria.
▶️ Modular networks with mutant swarms → recurrent oscillations.

No seasonal forcing is required to produce these oscillations!!!

3/7 To study this, we introduce an eco-evolutionary epidemic model coupling:

✔ Contagion
✔ Immune memory & cross-immunity
✔ Mutation as diffusion on genotype networks

All within a minimal, analytically tractable framework.

2/7 Classical eco-evolutionary models describe antigenic drift in low-dimensional antigenic spaces.

However, genomic data tell a different story: real viruses evolve on heterogeneous, modular genotype networks, with mutant swarms capturing different viral lineages.

1/7 🚨 New article out in @commsphys.nature.com

We show that viral 🦠 evolution is best captured through complex genotype networks, whose topology alone can drive oscillatory endemic dynamics and epidemic variability:

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

🚨 Last hours!!! 👇

Our two youngest members, @frandilisante.bsky.social and Hernán Gracia, were awarded yesterday as the best Master’s and Bachelor’s students at the San Alberto Magno festivity in our Faculty of Science at @unizar.es

Congratulations, and keep enjoying the research journey!! 🚀

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 9/12. Thrilled to have Jordi Soriano as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #neurons and #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 10/12. Thrilled to have Lisette Espín-Noboa @lespin.bsky.social as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #socialinequality and #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 12/12. Thrilled to have Virginia Domínguez-García @domgarvir.bsky.social as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #ecology and #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 11/12. Thrilled to have Vito Latora as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #dynamics and #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 4/12. Thrilled to have Anna Levina as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #networks, #neurons and #criticality!

🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 5/12. Thrilled to have Laurent Hébert-Dufresne @lhd.bsky.social as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #networks and #dynamics!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 6/12. Thrilled to have Sylvia Cremer as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #networks, #socialimmunity and #ants!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 7/12. Thrilled to have Sandro Meloni @smelons.bsky.social as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #dynamics on #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

📢 Keynotes unlocked: 8/12. Thrilled to have Andrea Migliano as a keynote speaker in Complenet’26! Join us to learn more about #anthropology and #networks!
🌐 Info & registration: complenet.weeblysite.com
🚨 Call for contributions open – submit by Nov 15, 2025!

🎉 So excited to host the next CompleNet conference 🎉

Don’t miss it 👇 See you next May in Zaragoza!!!

🎉 So excited to host the next CompleNet conference 🎉

Don’t miss it 👇 See you next May in Zaragoza!!!

This week we are hosting Olga Vasilieva from Univalle (Colombia), to discuss new approaches to mitigate vector-borne diseases in both plants and human populations.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of attending her talk on control mechanisms to eliminate Diaphorina citri, super interesting!!!

4/4 Finally, we establish a general correspondence between our model and broader classes of competing social contagion dynamics with symmetry breaking, recovering previous results as limiting cases.