Postal address: Lenka Zdeborova, MS B258 Los Alamos National Laboratory 87434 Los Alamos, New Mexico, U.S.A. Tel. (to my office): +1-505-667-0112 The most reliable way to contact me: lenka.zdeborova@gmail.com

I am Director's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Nonlinear Studies and the T-4 theoretical division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory

Do you want to see my cv? Download a pdf here.

Do you want to read my research resume? Download a pdf here.

I am interested in statistical physics of complex systems

Statistical physics has been developed in order to study the collective behavior of many-particle systems. Traditionally, it aims at understanding physical materials composed out of a large number of molecules or other small constituents of matter. Probability theory is combined with microscopic rules (interactions) to describe the collective properties such as the heat capacity, the density or various phase transitions. Motivated by the demands of our developing society, today's science needs to understand many other systems composed of a large number of interacting elements. To give few examples these elements may be: agents selling and buying items on the market, genes regulating the cell functions or dys-functions, the network of power lines delivering energy to our homes, Boolean variables in logical formulas designed to verify functions of electronic devices, planes landing and departing in a large international airport, or the network of neurons in our brain that allows one to read and comprehend this very text.

The experience collected over decades by physicists in the studies of matter needs to be exploited in order to understand, or predict, new relations between the microscopic (local) and macroscopic (global) properties of these complex systems. Particularly handy in this task are techniques developed in studies of disordered systems such as spin glasses, structural glasses, interfaces pinned by impurities, polymer networks or grains of sand. This is because the above mentioned complex systems are very rarely ordered, homogeneous or strongly symmetric, often they are not even embedded in an Euclidean space. This is the general line of research that makes me passionate and that I develop.