Research
Check out this video created by graduate student Margie Knight in Planktos!
The main focus of our lab is on modeling human and animal behavior, including its effects on collective behavior, population ecology, decision-making, and infectious disease epidemiology. We use a large variety of mathematical and computational tools in our research and cover a wide range of applications in biology – examples of current and past projects include studies of locust swarm dynamics, colony collapse disorder in social bees under the influence of pesticide stressors, parasitoid wasp dispersal in agricultural biocontrol, tick population and disease dynamics, addiction epidemiology, the social and policy dynamics of early-stage pandemic-level outbreaks, and the collective interaction of small organisms in fluid flow around larger predators. The last of these is driven by an in-house software development project called Planktos that is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF-DMS #2410988).
Our approach places an emphasis on careful, application-specific modeling followed by computation and analysis. We are increasingly using AI to accelerate our research, and we are very interested in an integrated mathematical and statistical approach to solving real-world problems while collaborating with scientists and engineers. If you would like to know more, please get in touch!
Some Recent Publications
- Pearcy, Queen, Jodoin, Lenhart, Strickland (2026). Construction and data-driven analysis of a stochastic, individual-based opioid epidemiology network model. Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Simulation with Applications, 5(4), 3.
- Bouka, Strickland (2025). Strong information delay as a driver of epidemic waves: mathematical modeling for drug trends and epidemic bio-preparedness. Theoretical Population Biology, 167, 22-39.
- Pearcy, Lenhart, Strickland (2024). Structural instability and linear allocation control in generalized models of substance use disorder. Mathematical Biosciences, 371, 109169.
- Elzinga, Strickland (2023). Generalized stressors on hive and forager bee colonies. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 85(122).
- Elzinga, Beckford, Strickland (2023). A mathematical model of the impacts of climate change on the winter tick epizootic in moose. Ecological Modelling, 483, 110421.
- Gross, McCord, LoRe, Ganusov, Hong, Strickland, Talmy, von Arnim, Wiggins (2023). Prioritization of the concepts and skills in quantitative education for graduate students in biomedical science. PLOS ONE, 18, 1-12.
- Hamlet, Strickland, Battista, Miller (2023). Multiscale flow between the branches and polyps of gorgonians. Journal of Experimental Biology, 266(5): jeb244520.
- Phillips, Gaoue, Lenhart, Strickland (2023). Modeling the effects of size-dependent harvesting strategies on the population dynamics of tropical trees. Mathematical Biosciences, 355, 108953.
- Strickland, Battista, Hamlet, Miller (2022). Planktos: An agent-based modeling framework for small organism movement and dispersal in a fluid environment with immersed structures. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 84(72).
- Phillips, Lenhart, Strickland (2021). A data-driven mathematical model of the heroin and fentanyl epidemic in Tennessee. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 83(97).
- Bernoff, Culshaw-Maurer, Everett, Hohn, Strickland, Weinburd (2020). Agent-based and continuous models of hopper bands for the Australian plague locust: How resource consumption can mediate pulse formation and geometry, PLOS Comp. Bio., 16(5), e1007820.
- Battista, Pearcy, Strickland (2019). Modeling the prescription opioid epidemic, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 81(7), 2258-2289.
More listed at Christopher Strickland’s personal website.
Collaborator Websites
- Laura Miller (Math Physiology Lab at U Arizona)
- Nick Battista (Mathematical biologist specializing in computational fluid dynamics. Maintains the software package IB2d.)
- Patrick Shipman (Mathematical biologist specializing in pattern formation.)
