Morsky Lab

About

Welcome to the Morsky Lab website. We work at the crossroads of mathematics, biology, and economics. Lab members are primarily interested in understanding biological and economic systems through mathematical modelling. Much of this work focuses on cooperation and coordination in a variety of settings, such as human communities, cancer, and infectious diseases. Additionally, many biological and abiological systems are heavily impacted by human behaviour, and so incorporating behaviour into such models is critical in understanding their dynamics. To study such systems, we frequently employ a game theoretical framework that features social dilemmas. We are interested in cases where social dilemmas arises, how they arise, and how they may be ameliorated.

The lab is currently accepting graduate students. Information for prospective graduate students can be found on the Department's website. For current FSU grad students, please send an email to Bryce Morsky at bmorsky@fsu.edu. Informal inquiries are welcome. A strong background in and enthusiams for mathematical or computational theory in ecology, evolution, and/or economics is ideal. There are a great variety of complex biological and economic systems that we can explore.

Research

Norms, cooperation, and coordination

We are broadly interested in cooperation and coordination in humans: the role of norms, human rationality, group formation, and collective action. Theory can address these topics and has roles in understanding their dynamics with applications for policy-makers. Our work in this field has addressed questions such as group formation through imitation and through dishonest signalling, and the emergence of norms. Coordination can be attained through the emergence of shared norms, which occurs through an evolutionary process acting like a blind choreographer, analogous to Dawkins’ blind watchmaker [journal]. Such norms can be predicated on natural events that have no inherent meaning. And yet, normative meaning that coordinates behaviours can emerge (more technically speaking, the system can evolve to a correlated equilibrium).

Social norms, institutions, and infectious disease

The spread of pathogens in human populations crucially depends on political, psychological, and economic factors. They can impact the efficacy of treatment and public policy through their effects on human behaviour. Social norms, cultural practices, and laws, both formal and informal, pressed by political and social institutions are examples. These and other behavioural factors may promote or inhibit the spread of disease, and thus have implications for public policy. We are interested in understing how policy and the various economic and biological components of disease impact one another. With this understanding, we can design policies to best mitigate disease.

Sociality in cancer and bacteria

Cancer and bacteria can produce public goods that are prone to being taken advantage of by free-riders. Examples include angiogenic factors in tumours, and siderophore production in bacteria. Because cheaters do not pay the cost of production of these goods, they have more energy to compete against altruists. Cheaters thus seem to be detrimental to the tumour. However, the presence of cheaters can benefit the tumour as a whole in overcoming the immune response [journal]. More generally, how can we control a pathogen using our understanding of ecology and evolution? In particular, what are the roles of competition, cooperation, and phenotypic, genotypic, and spatial heterogeneity? And, how may we leverage them to design optimal treatment protocols?

Truncation selection

A further line of research in the lab is understanding mechanisms of selection and evolutionary algorithms. The replicator equation assumes proportional selection: the number of offspring is proportional to the difference between the payoffs a replicator receives and the average payoff all other replicators receive. Under truncation selection, however, replicators with sufficient payoffs survive to reproduce [journal]. Interestingly, the mathematics of this project are related to those of timing in public goods games [journal]. Both models are limits of a more general two-stage process represented by a differential algebraic equation. We are keen to continue this project by understanding the effects and relations between these and related concepts in evolutionary computation more deeply and by developing a more general theory of selection with applications to biology and computer science.

People

Bryce Morsky

Bryce is an Assistant Professor of Biomathematics in the Department of Mathematics at Florida State University. He completed his MSc and PhD in Mathematics at the University of Guelph under the guidance of Chris Bauch, and was a postdoc under Derviş Can Vural at the University of Notre Dame, Erol Akçay at the University of Pennsylvania, and Troy Day and Felicia Magpantay at Queen's University.

Jonathan Engle

Jonathan completed his BS in Mathematics and BA in Quantitative Economics at Drake University. Currently, he is an Applied and Computational Mathematics PhD student at Florida State University. His research interests include evolutionary game theory, dynamical systems, and computational methods for games. He is researching the dynamics of voting games and has a preprint: Engle, J. and Morsky, B., 2024. The dynamics of strategic voting: pathways to consensus and gridlock. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20237. [preprint]

Louis Rubin

Louis received his BS in Mathematics from Temple University and his MA in Mathematics from Saint Louis University. Currently, he is a PhD student in Pure Mathematics at Florida State University. His research interests include algebra and number theory. Here is a recent publication: Rubin, L., 2024. A correspondence induced by an involution centralizing an index-two subgroup. Quasigroups & Related Systems, 32(2). [journal]

Former members

Neel Pandula

Neel is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and has a publication on indirect reciprocity: Pandula, N., Akçay, E. and Morsky, B., 2024. Indirect reciprocity with abductive reasoning. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 580, p.111715. [journal]

Ruiyang Su

Ruiyang has a Bachelor's from Queen's University and a Master's from Nanyang Technological University Singapore. And she has a publication on relational utility and norms in games.

Zhuoer Zhang

Zhuoer has a Bachelor's from Queen's University in physics and is planning to get a Master's degree in computer engineering at New York University. His interests include: classical, evolutionary, algorithmic, and epistemic game theory; optimization; and quantitative finance. He has a preprint on applications of linear programming, maximin strategies and their relaxed convex hulls on regining truncation selection models: Zhang, Z. and Morsky, B., 2024. A maximin based, linear programming approach to worst-case scenario control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.14547. [preprint]

Zuojun Zhou

Zuojun has a Bachelor's from Queen's University and is a graduate student at John Hopkins University in applied math and statistics. His interests include evolution within the market and society, especially evolutionary game theory.

Elina Zhuang

Elina has a Bachelor's from Queen's University and is a graduate student at Cornell University in Financial Engineering. She's interested in evolutionary game theory, machine learning, and mathematical finance.

Contact

bmorsky@fsu.edu

Department of Mathematics
111 Love Building
1017 Academic Way
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4510