Humboldt Research Award for Frank den Hollander

About the Humboldt Research Award

The Humboldt Research Award is granted in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. Award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany.

New work with the Humboldt Award

In the past Frank den Hollander has worked with Andreas Greven and Anton Bovier on "stochastic 
models for genetic evolution" and "phase transitions and metastability for interacting particle 
systems". Frank intends to use the award for a few longer stays in Erlangen and Bonn, to give 
the research a further impulse and thereby also new directions.

With Andreas Greven (Universität Erlangen-Nurnberg) Frank is working on "spatial populations 
with seed-bank", in which they look at the effect on genetic diversity of a reservoir in which the
population can withdraw temporarily in order not to participate in evolutionary processes such as
selection, mutation and migration. NETWORKS PhD researcher Margriet Oomen is also involved 
in this research.

With Anton Bovier (Universität Bonn) Frank is currently working on "metastability under conser-
vation laws", wherein the challenge is to investigate the effect of non-local properties that arise 
as a result of conservation laws, and on "metastability on random graphs", wherein the challenge 
is to assess the effect of the degree distribution on the metastable crossover time.

Lastly Frank intends to pay a few shorter visits to Berlin, Mainz and München in connection with 
ongoing research that concentrates on complex networks, entropy of random processes and 
phase transitions in continuous systems.