I am a professor in the department of Mathematics & Statistics of
Dalhousie University. I teach and do research in graph theory and combinatorics. My current research focuses
on spatial random graphs and graphons.
I have been at Dalhousie since 1998. Before that, I studied at the Technical University
Eindhoven, in the Netherlands (where I am from), where I wrote my thesis on error-correcting codes
under Professors Jack van Lint
and Henk van Tilborg. I did my graduate studies at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania,
under Professor Ed Assmus.
My PhD thesis was on Latin squares.
During my PhD studies I had a brief moment of fame when I made significant progress towards the
Dinitz conjecture.
After post-doctoral positions in Montreal and London I moved to Canada.
My research after my PhD focused on graph colourings
. A colleague from Computer
Science, Evangelos Milios, got me interested in the study of "real-life" complex networks,
such as on-line social networks. With Evangelos, we started and led a MITACS-funded project on Modelling and Mining
of Information Spaces (MoMiNIS), which was active for nearly ten years.
Pawel Pralat, a post-doc funded through the
project and now a professor at TMU, led me into the world of random graphs and graph models.
With co-authors, we proposed the Spatial Preferential Attachment (SPA) model.
I have worked a lot with Anthony Bonato.
Anthony was a participant of MoMiNIS and a co-author of the SPA model paper.
We also proposed a new line of research on infinite geometric graphs. Co-supervision of a PhD
student lead to the first paper on graph burning. Currently, my most important collaborators are
Mahya Ghandehari and
Aaron Smith.
In our collaborations, we use tools from harmonic analysis and probability as well as graph theory.
I was Scientific director of AARMS and an officer of the
SIAM Discrete Math Activity Group. I was one of the founders of
the workshop series WAW. I am the organizer of the
Atlantic Combinatorics Seminar series.
I served two terms as
head of department and was member and Chair of the
Faculty of Science Tenure and Promotion committee. I have been a member of the NSERC
Discovery grant evaluation committee and of the
Denes Konig prize committee.
I am currently on the jury
for the Spinoza and Stevin prizes, the most prestigious
science awards in the Netherlands.