Wilfred graduated with an MMath from Cambridge University in 2021, where he took a variety of topics from mixing times of Markov chains to Astrostatistics. He wrote a final year essay on using the method of Stein discrepancies on heavy-tailed distributions but is hoping to pursue something probabilistic with more real-world applications. Outside of maths, Wilfred enjoys drumming, board games, films and shamelessly plugging his origami instagram channel @creaseistheword.

Research project title:
Reinforced random walk models and biologically inspired network design

Supervisor(s):

Cécile Mailler, Daniel Kious

Project description:
The slime Physarum Polycephalum (aka the blob) has been the subject of extensive research over the past decade as it is able to construct optimal transport networks in multiple scenarios. In particular, it does so without centralised control or global knowledge of the system. The aim of this PhD project is to develop a reinforced random walk model that emulates the behaviour of the blob, make rigorous the notion of optimality of a network and prove that this model indeed exhibits this optimality.