Igor Belykh

Igor Belykh Distinguished University Professor Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Georgia State University, Mailing address: P.O. Box 4110, Atlanta, GA 30302-410 Physical address: 25 Park Place, office 1309 Phone: (404) 413-6411 Fax: (404) 413-6403 Email: ibelykh@gsu.edu

I am a Distinguished University Professor of Applied Mathematics with a joint appointment at Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. I am also an associate member of the Center for Nonlinear Science at Georgia Institute of Technology.

I received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the Chair of Nonlinear Dynamics and Automatic Control at the University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia in 2000, under the direction of Professor Leonid P. Shilnikov, the pioneer of homoclinic bifurcation theory. During my Ph.D. study, as a Swiss Confederation Scholar, I spent an academic year in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne from 1998 to 1999.

Prior to joining Georgia State in 2006, I completed a five-year postdoc in the Laboratory of Nonlinear Systems, joint with the Brain Mind Institute at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).

I am fundamentally motivated by an interest in using applied and computational mathematics to gain insight into complex biological and man-made systems. My main research interests are in applications of dynamical systems in biology, neuroscience, and engineering, including complex networks, dynamical instabilities in mechanical systems, the origin of motor diseases, locomotion and models of human gait, and robotics. In particularly, I apply rigorous mathematical techniques and computational methods to investigate the interplay between network structure and overall network dynamics, in view of its role in information processing, cooperative behavior, and pattern formation.

My research is currently supported under four federal grants: a 2022-2026 Office of Naval Research grant ("Disorder-promoted synchronization," joint with Adilson Motter (Northwestern University) and Yehuda Braiman (UCF), $780,000) and three National Science Foundation grants (2019-2022 grant "Modern Approaches to Modeling and Predicting Bridge Instabilities:" DMS-1909924; 2020-2024 grant "LEAP-HI: Understanding and Engineering the Ecosystem of Firearms: Prevalence, Safety, and Firearm-Related Harms:" CMMI-1953135; and 2020-2023 grant "Stochastic Dynamics of Vibro-Impact Systems with Applications in Energy Harvesting:" CMMI- 2009329). I had a number of federal grants in the past, including a 2016-2019 NSF grant: (DMS-1616345), a 2010-2015 grant (DMS-1009744), and a 2015-2018 U.S. Army Research Office grant (No. W911NF-15-1-267).

I serve on the editorial boards of five international journals, including the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. I am also on the Editorial Advisory Board of Chaos. In the past, I also served multiple terms on the editorial boards of International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I, where I received the Best Associate Editor award for the 2012-2013 term.

See updates on our collaborative research on 'WE SAFE'.

My lab's video was selected as a semi-finalist in the nation-wide 2019 NSF We are Mathematics Video Competition.

Click to access its YouTube version:

Our 2017 Science Advances paper received media coverage from major news outlets, including The New York Times, Physics World, Popular Science, Science News, New Scientist , Russia News Today, Welt Der Physik (in German):

This NSF-funded research on modeling pedestrian-bridge interactions was also featured in a GSU front page article "Biomechanical Model Could Reduce Wobbling Of Pedestrian Bridges."

There are PhD student positions available in my group. Highly motivated students interested in applied dynamical systems and networks are welcome to apply by e-mail. Funding is also available for undergraduate students.