Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 5: Focus Session: Physics of Behavior (joint session SOE/DY)

Monday, March 9, 2026, 09:30–12:45, GÖR/0226

Organizers: Greg Stephens (Vrije Univ. Amsterdam), Pawel Romanczuk (HU Berlin)

Physics has made important contributions to the remarkable progress in characterizing the molecules, cells, and circuits that generate natural behavior. Yet our understanding of behavior at the scale of the whole organism and in ecological and social contexts remains significantly less advanced. Even in simpler organisms, natural behavior is complex, requiring new tools for measurement (often through novel imaging), analysis, and theoretical insight. The emerging field of the physics of behavior addresses this gap by seeking to quantitatively characterize complex behavior in naturalistic settings. This focus session will highlight recent advances at the intersection of physics, neuroscience, biology, and social sciences with contributions from both theorists and experimentalists.

	09:30	DY 5.1	Invited Talk: Memory and equilibrium in collective animal behaviour — •Thierry Mora
	10:00	DY 5.2	Spin-Waves without Spin-Waves: A Case for Soliton Propagation in Starling Flocks — •Andrea Cavagna
	10:15	DY 5.3	Modelling filamentous fungal growth — •Pascal Klamser, Carlos Aguilar-Trigueros und Dirk Brockmann
	10:30		15 min. break
	10:45	DY 5.4	Understanding how movement behaviors shape animal encounters and their ecological consequences — •Anudeep Surendran
	11:00	DY 5.5	Composite and combined games in evolutionary dynamics in finite populations — Henry Brooks, Suzannah Gebbett, and •Jens Christian Claussen
	11:15	DY 5.6	A reversal in agent preference reveals partial segregation in the Schelling model — •Maksim Prusakov and Dirk Brockmann
	11:30	DY 5.7	Emergence of power-laws and the uncertainty principle in human contact duration — •Jun Sun
	11:45		15 min. break
	12:00	DY 5.8	Wired differently: Individual-level Adaptive Belief Networks — •Peter Steiglechner, Victor Møller Poulsen, Mirta Galesic, and Henrik Olsson
	12:15	DY 5.9	Critical Transitions of Reinforcement Learning Dynamics in Social Dilemmas — •Balakrishna Prabhu B N and Wolfram Barfuss
	12:30	DY 5.10	Statistical mechanics of connected graphs in Scrabble — •Olivier Witteveen and Marianne Bauer