Max Planck India Partner Group Successfully Reviewed and Extended

Congratulations to the head of our Max Planck India Partner Group Areejit Samal on the successful outcome of the mid-term review and extension of the group until June 2022. The Max Planck Society underlines the “excellent research work in network theory and its applications to biology during the first three years since the inception of the partner group”. We wish Areejit and all group members much success and all the best for the next two years.

The Max Planck India Partner Group is affiliated to the Computational Biology group of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) in Chennai, India. Due to the close collaboration with Jürgen Jost and other members of the Complex Systems Group including Amirhossein Farzam, Parvaneh Joharinad and Emil Saucan at our MPI, there is a lively scientific exchange between both institutions.

The research of the partner group is focused on developing geometry-inspired measures for complex networks. Commonly, a complex system with many components and interactions among them is represented as a graph or network. In mathematics, a current research area is the development of systematic theories for discrete structures which include graphs or networks. In this collaborative research, Samal and Jost are applying notions of discrete curvature in geometry to analyze the structure of model- and real-life complex networks.

Areejit Samal is also a Ramanujan Fellow of the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) at the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of India and Simons Associate of the International Centre of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. He is also a Research Ambassador of Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) to promote bilateral academic cooperation between Germany and India.