Xianyuan Zhan, a graduate student in Lyles School of Civil Engineering, was awarded the prestigious JSMF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Complex Systems this year. The James S. McDonnell Foundation was established in 1950 by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell to "improve the quality of life," and does so by contributing to the generation of new knowledge through its support of research and scholarship. The postdoctoral fellowship program supports scholarship and research directed toward the development of theoretical and mathematical tools contributing to the science of complex, adaptive and nonlinear systems. The program awards 10 fellowships globally each year.

Xianyuan is a doctoral student working with Prof. Satish Ukkusuri in Transportation and Infrastructure Systems Engineering at Purdue. Xianyuan has been working on developing new mathematical complex network models to understand how city (transportation) networks grow, fail and recover spatially and temporally. The work brings together notions from network science, big data and game theory to create new tools for understanding the functioning of infrastructure networks. These models have implications in the design of resilient infrastructure networks. The title of Xianyuan’s research to be pursued under the fellowship is "functional failures and structure-function dependencies on flow-based complex networks."