<p>brilliant</a> 10 | Popular Science</p>
<p>For the last nine years, Popular Science Magazine has identified its "Brilliant 10". These are ten young researchers doing the most exciting work in universities and government labs across the country. Each must be under the age of 40. </p>
<p>This year, there were researchers from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Penn, Columbia, New York Polytechnic, the U. of Utah, the U. of Memphis and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (a government lab). Over the last nine years, Princeton has had a total of ten faculty members and alumni recognized by this award and has seen only a single year when it had no winners.<br>
Overall, the nine-year list has been dominated by Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Caltech.</p>
<p>This year, Princeton Professor Iain Couzin was one of the ten.</p>
<p>"The shuffle of life—the wheeling of birds, the silver flash of escaping fish—looks mystically organized. Iain Couzin, who models collective behavior in nature, identifies those patterns mathematically. And he’s finding that certain patterns extend across otherwise unrelated units of life, whether bugs or cancer cells.</p>
<p>Couzin, an associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, films animal behavior and analyzes the footage in a computer to pin down the collective decision-making process of animals, and how individuals affect it. Since the time of Aristotle, what we call emergence theory has shown that simple behaviors can produce complex results. But Couzin is spotting the specific mechanisms whereby locusts swarm or schools of fish evade predators. . . . (continued)"</p>
<p>Brilliant</a> 10: Iain Couzin, the Pattern Maker | Popular Science</p>
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<p>More about Professor Couzin's research can be found here:</p>