Holy cow, it was great to chat with Brennan Klein (1). It’s another renaissance person on the Pod.

In his research, Brennan attempts to understand how complex systems are able to represent, predict, and intervene on their surroundings across a number of different scales—all in ways that appear to maintain the statistical boundary between them and their environment.

He uses this approach to study a range of phenomena from decision making, to experimental design, to causation and emergence in networks.

Brennan is currently working with Professors Alessandro Vespignani and Sam Scarpino on a research examining the teleology of networks, or why there appears to be an apparent purpose or goal-directedness to the dynamics and structure of networks.

He received a BA in Cognitive Science and Psychology from Swarthmore College in 2014, studying the relationship between perception, action, and cognition.  I received my PhD in Network Science from Northeastern University in 2020.

Now he’s  a postdoc at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, he’s a senior researcher at Verses Inc (2) and he’s a Data for Justice Fellow at Institute for the Study of Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety; The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at a small university, Harvard.

With those two postdoc advisors, it should come as no surprise that during COVID, Brennan has a number of important COVID related publications as well.

We talk about his paper “Network comparison and the within-ensemble graph distance” (3) but there’s so much more!!

And finally Brennan makes art under the pseudonym JK Rofling (4). I urge every single one of you to go check out his art. It’s great. And I totally didn’t get to ask him about it. Because we spent so much time covering the many other exciting things Brennan has got going on.

References
(1) https://www.jkbrennan.com
(2) https://www.verses.io
(3) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2019.0744
(4) https://www.jkrofling.com