Professor Damien Hicks

Biography

I lead the Complex Systems group in the Optical Sciences Centre. Through a dialogue between biological questions, physical models, and statistical methods my group develops ways to model systems represented with high-dimensional data. I am particularly interested in how one identifies the objects of interest in a complex system, where collective entities can emerge. Symmetries are a powerful organising principle here and we have shown how representation theory reveals the stages of decision-making in cell lineage trees. We have also explored how symmetry invariants in the parameter space of a neural population model can uncover the physiological drivers of brain dynamics. I received my BS (1993) and MS (1993) from Stanford University and my PhD (1999) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Applied Plasma Physics. From 2000-2014 I was a post-doc then staff physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. After returning to Australia, I was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2015-2019.