{"id":1999,"date":"2016-02-08T14:48:07","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T18:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/ebuckhor\/?page_id=1999"},"modified":"2016-02-08T14:48:07","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T18:48:07","slug":"skardal-research-published","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/along-the-walk\/skardal-research-published\/","title":{"rendered":"Skardal Research Published"},"content":{"rendered":"

Research by Trinity College Assistant Professor of Mathematics Per Sebastian Skardal, above, on dynamical systems, with many possible biological and technological applications, was published in August 2015 in the online journal Science Advances.<\/p>\n

Titled \u201cControl of coupled oscillator networks with application to microgrid technologies,\u201d the paper was written with co-author Alex Arenas, who served as Skardal\u2019s postdoctoral research adviser at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain.<\/p>\n

\"SILO_Skardal2\"<\/a>Skardal is an applied mathematician with a particular interest in dynamical systems \u2014 which he describes as systems that evolve in time \u2014 and their ties with complex networks. \u201cI use the example with students these days of Facebook. Everyone goes on Facebook; it\u2019s a social network, so you have these links connecting different people if they\u2019re friends,\u201d he said. \u201cI study how different groups of people or objects interact and how those interactions lead to particular behaviors. I\u2019m particularly interested in when something big happens in the network, when all the objects start behaving similarly, or when an epidemic grows into a big thing that affects a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

A biological example can be found in cardiac pacemaker cells, which Skardal said have to synchronize so they can send signals to the rest of the heart. The power grid is an example of mechanical synchronization.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn efficient power grid \u2026 is a power grid where all of the sources and loads are synchronized with one another, so they have to move at the same rate,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd when one desynchronizes, that basically corresponds to a power failure in that region.\u201d<\/p>\n

Skardal hopes that this research could contribute to the continuing development of microgrids, smaller power grids that can operate in isolation from the larger power grid. He added, \u201cWhat we really believe and hope for is that these ideas are actually much more general. For instance, when a heart is beating asynchronously, in a ventricular fibrillation sort of state, we could use these ideas to synchronize systems using as little control as possible.\u201d
\nSkardal, who came to Trinity in July 2015, holds a B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research by Trinity College Assistant Professor of Mathematics Per Sebastian Skardal, above, on dynamical systems, with many possible biological and technological applications, was published in August 2015 in the online journal Science Advances. Titled \u201cControl of coupled oscillator networks with application to microgrid technologies,\u201d the paper was written with co-author Alex Arenas, who served as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"parent":1466,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-full-width.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1999\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/reporter-winter2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}