Gheorghe Craciun

Gheorghe Craciun is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His research interests involve mathematical and computational models in biology and medicine, and especially dynamical systems models of biological interaction networks. Very often these models are systems of differential equations with polynomial right-hand side and contain many unknown parameters. He has been visiting MPI MiS during the 2019-2020 academic year and has collaborated with Miruna-Stefana Sorea and Laura Brustenga on using algebraic geometry tools for understanding the set of parameters for which these dynamical systems have specific properties, such as global convergence to a unique equilibrium point. These results extend previous work done in collaboration with Alicia Dickenstein, Anne Shiu, and Bernd Sturmfels, and can be used for analyzing biochemical reaction networks, the interactions of species in an ecosystem, the spread of infections in a population. There are also strong connections to the theory of discrete Boltzmann equations.