SFI External Professor and Science Board member Raissa D’Souza has joined the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science magazine, one of the world’s top peer-reviewed journals.
According to the Science website, 80% of submitted manuscripts are rejected without review and less than 7% of all submitted manuscripts are eventually accepted for publication. Science seeks out influential papers across scientific disciplines, and D’Souza, according to her appointment letter, will be assisting the Editors in "identifying those manuscripts to be sent for in-depth review in the fields of network science, applied mathematics, and machine learning. She is also invited to play an active role in shaping the research that is highlighted in Science, in particular concerning new developments deserving of a perspective or a review, and exciting research reported at meetings.”
D’Souza is known for her contributions to the mathematics of networks. She and her colleagues introduced a landmark model called explosive percolation, which offers insights for understanding and controlling real-world phenomena that arise in networks across domains, including transportation networks, disease spread, the growth of the Internet, power grid failures, and financial crashes. The paper was published in 2009, in Science.
More recently, D’Souza authored a 100-page review article (preprint here) of state-of-the-art techniques in explosive phenomena on complex networks.
D’Souza has been a member of SFI’s external faculty since 2007, and also currently serves on the Science Board. She has organized many working groups at SFI over the years, with SFI External Professor Jim Crutchfield, SFI Professor Cris Moore, and others, exploring special problems that arise in evolving, interconnected networks. She is based at the University of California, Davis where she works across departments for Computer Science, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Complexity Science.