About me

I am a postdoc at the Institut Camille Jordan at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1.

The title of my PhD thesis is Collective behaviour of active particles with mean-field interaction. I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge, where I was affiliated with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), under supervision of Maria Bruna. In 2024-2025, I was a Recognised Visiting Student at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford.

Research

I am interested in mathematically understanding the emergence of collective behaviour. Examples of this emergent behaviour are lane formation in groups of ants or pedestrians, or flocking in birds.

Street crossing in Tokyo

I focus on

• PDE analysis (well-posedness, (non)linear stability, bifurcations),
• Developing numerical PDE and SDE schemes,
• Numerical analysis of these schemes,
• Rigorous mean-field limits,
• SDE parameter inference from data.

We found the following two typical behaviours.

The first is an aggregation type behaviour. The second is the formation of an ant lane. In the papers, we explain how this is related to lane formation and ant antennas.

Email: dewit"at"math.univ-lyon1.fr.