Elisabeth zu-Erbach-Schoenberg

Position: Postgraduate Research Student
Institution: Management (FBL)
Contact: Complete this online contact form to contact Elisabeth.

My first degree is a Diploma (combined Bachelor's and Master's degree) in Bioinformatics from the University of Jena. During my masters, I specialised in artificial life, systems biology and agent-based modelling.

In 2014 I graduated with a PhD of the DTC Complex Systems Simulation programme run by the ICSS.

For my PhD I have been working on the simulation of processes happening on social networks and the dynamic changes of these social networks. My main focus were agent-based models of social network fragmentation, modelling cases where a previously connected network splits up into two or more components following a disagreement of two actors.

In some situations this splitting of the social network can be explained as individuals actively choosing sides, but frequently it is the same individual behaviour that first maintains and later splits the network. I am researching behavioural rules and structural constraints that lead to networks exhibiting this phenomenon. One such constraint is the spatial embedding of the nodes in space and I am investigating how the spatial arrangement influences the network topology as well as the robustness looking for potential interventions that could make social networks less fragile and more coherent.