When not climbing in the Alps or racing a carbon fiber Pinarello, I am an applied mathematician, geographic information systems scientist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University. I currently teach courses in the foundations of GIS and the mathematical & algorithmic basis of deep learning, at University College London, and at Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris.

I am the director of BIO-MAP AI, where we use bioinformatic and genomic data, machine learning, and advanced geographic information systems, to study the far-from-equilibrium and non-stationary transmission of zoonotic diseases and the movement patterns of their animal hosts.

Our current projects are centered on using wavelet and non-linear approximation methods to study the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and other past epidemics, like the medieval patterns of plague transmission in Europe and Eurasia, and on reconstructing the dynamics of the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in west Africa. The Lab’s theoretical work concentrates on the application and development of signal processing techniques, especially wavelets, to high-dimensional epidemiological geospatial time-series data.

My own theoretical research focuses on the mathematical foundations of deep and machine learning. Specifically, on using renormalization group methods and Ising models, like the Wolff algorithm family of techniques.

Interested in preserving the early history of GIS and early applications of computer technology to spatial problems, I founded the Relic-Code Lab, where our research is dedicated to the reconstruction and conservation of historic software—programs, algorithms, and computational systems that have historically shaped our digital world, but which are now technologically inaccessible or materially endangered.

Our work combines digital forensics, archival research, programming language history, and emulation to bring vanished computational objects back into view. We collaborate with libraries, museums, and archives to preserve fragile code and to document the intellectual, political, and social contexts that gave rise to these artifacts.

Our current conservation projects center on reconstructing the code of the Simulmatics Corporation, who revolutionized computational election and voting trend analysis in the 1960s; on preserving materials from the early use of computers in US congressional redistricting; conserving the early mathematical proof assistant, the Logic Theorist; and working on emulating the code found in the seminal Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography.

The author or editor of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller and NPR selection, MAP: exploring the world, I am now trying to turn a mess of mathematical course notes into the forthcoming book, The Algebra of Space: Lectures on Mereotopology, Category Theory and the Ontological Foundations of Geographic Information Science.

Convinced that region based and point-free geometries, like those of Whitehead and Goodman, can serve as the foundation for a more process based ontology for GIS, I am working on mathematical commentaries on Alfred North Whitehead’s 1916, La Theorie Relationniste de L’Espace and William Lawvere's 1992, Categories of Space and Quantity.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, I find being close to the gentle hum of supercomputers, pondering the complexities of Wittgenstein’s ‘Notes on Logic’, and exploring the deep labyrinths of the renormalization group, strangely comforting.

I currently live in Nice, France.