Prof. Christian Beck Address : School of Mathematical Sciences Queen Mary, University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS, UK Room Number: MB-121, Maths building Telephone: +44 20 7882 3286 E-Mail: c.beck@qmul.ac.uk

I am Head of the newly created Centre for Complex Systems (union of old DSSP and CS group) at Queen Mary.
For 6 years (2017-2022) I was Chair of the Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS).
In 2023 I was elected to the Executive Committee of EPS. This is the highest gremium of EPS working directly with the EPS president.
From 2021-2023 I was Alan Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.
I am also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
I am on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports, and currently I am also an Advisory Editor of Physica A and on the Editoral Board of the journal Entropy.

Research highlights :

• Recent paper on the dynamics of residential electricity consumption: Nature Commun. (2022)

• Recent paper on heterogeneity of air pollution statistics: Scientific Reports (2022)

• Recent paper on machine learning techniques for water quality in rivers: Scientific Reports (2022)

• In total I have 160 published papers which attracted approximately 10000 citations. See publication list for details.

• I have a very broad spectrum of research interests, ranging from statistical physics, dynamical systems, stochastic processes and spatio-temporal complex systems to axionic dark matter physics and dark energy. Applied topics of my research include the dynamics of green energy systems (in particular the undertanding of power grids with a large fraction of renewables), as well as research on air pollution statistics and water quality.
• I have held major EPSRC grants, for example the following one which dealt with stochastic modelling aspects of demand and supply in electricity networks, in close collaboration with two industry partners.
  Nash equilibria for load balancing in networked power systems (Christian Beck, Vito Latora). value 497K
  More information on the activities of this project can be found here.
• I was co-investigator of the EPSRC grant Flood MEMORY (Multi-Event Modelling Of Risk & recoverY), a joint project of 10 UK universities to better understand the clustered statistics of flooding events.
  
• In 2022 I got a QMUL/Reseach England Policy Impact grant (value 50K),
  dealing with air pollution statistics and water quality monitoring.
  I also got a small grant (5K) for joint research activities with Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, as well as another grant (10K) for impact generation at QMUL.
  More details below, under the section "Other activities".
  
• main research interests
  ---Stochastic modelling of Complex Systems
  ---Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaotic Behaviour
  ---Statistical Mechanics
  ---Josephson junctions
  ---Axionic dark matter
  ---the cosmological constant and other models of dark energy
  ---real-world complex systems (electricity networks, air pollution, ...)

  -- Some further topics I am interested in:
  --- Coupled Map Lattices and Spatio-Temporal Chaos
  ---Statistics of Lagrangian quantum turbulence
  ---Thermodynamic Formalism of Dynamical Systems
  ---Nonequilibrium phenomena
  --- Generalized statistical mechanics methods for complex systems
  --- Superstatistics
  --- environmental time series, air pollution statistics, traffic delay statistics
  --- Brownian motion, Langevin processes, nonequilibrium situations
  --- Fully Developed Turbulence
  ---Stochastic processes on networks
  --- Chaotic scalar fields, dynamical models of vacuum fluctuations
  --- Possible measurable effects of dark energy and dark matter in superconducting devices
  ---dark matter axions
  ---extreme event statistics
  ---stochastic volatility in mathematical finance
  ---(anomalous) diffusion of biomolecules in living cells
  ---water quality in rivers

  In total my scientific work has been cited more than 9800 times (view my Google Scholar profile)

  Information for prospective PhD students

  postdocs:
  --Dr Evangelos Mitsokapas (working on statistical analysis of airplane delays), 2023
  --Dr Pau Rabassa (working on superstatistical methods in the context of flooding and flood risk managementa), until 2015
  --Dr Randall Martyr (working on load balancing problems in electricity markets), until 2019
  --Dr Benjamin Schaefer (Marie Curie Fellow) (working on power grid dynamics and data-driven approaches to complex systems), until June 2021. He is now at KIT Karlsruhe.
  --Dr Evangelos Mitsokapas (2022/23, working on traffic delay statistics, jointly supervised with Rosemary Harris (UCL))

  academic visitors:
  --Dr Chris Penrose (working on rigorous aspects of superstatistical dynamical systems), until 2019
  --Dr Cigdem Yalcin (working on superstatistical models and cosmic rays), 2019

  PhD students:
  Shihan Miah (working on quantum turbulence, PhD awarded in 2015)
  Dan Xu (working on share price statistics, PhD awarded in 2017)
  Griffin Williams (working on air pollution statistics, PhD awarded in 2019)
  Jin Yan (working on coupled axion models and dynamical systems, PhD awarded in 2021, now at MPIPKS Dresden)
  Hankun He (working on air pollution and water quality statistics, 4th year)

Publications and Preprints :

Publications and preprints 2001-2023
Complete list of publications

My 1st book (with F. Schloegl, Cambridge University Press, 1993)
(paperback edition 1995)

My 2nd book (World Scientific, 2002)


Here you can see it in more detail.
This has appeared in the Advanced Series in Nonlinear Dynamics of World Scientific.

Another book of which I am a co-editor (World Scientific, 2005) is on Complexity, Metastability, and Nonextensive Methods.

Editorial Membership :

Since 2023 I am on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports

As a previous chairman (2017-2022) of the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division I recommend that you submit the occasional paper to EPL



I am also an Advisory Editor of
PHYSICA A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.

Teaching :

In 2023/24 I will be teaching the 3rd year module MTH6154 `Financial Mathematics 1' in semester A.
If you are a QMUL student, please consult the internal QMPLUS pages for the course material.
Office hours: Please e-mail for an appointment.

Other activities :

Personal :

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