William Gilpin
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wgilpin.bsky.social
William Gilpin
@wgilpin.bsky.social
650 followers 410 following 31 posts
asst prof at UT Austin physics interested in chaos, fluids, & biophysics.

https://www.wgilpin.com/
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wgilpin.bsky.social
William Gilpin @wgilpin.bsky.social · May 22
We present Panda: a foundation model for nonlinear dynamics pretrained on 20,000 chaotic ODE discovered via evolutionary search. Panda zero-shot forecasts unseen ODE best-in-class, and can forecast PDE despite having never seen them during training (1/8)
arxiv.org/abs/2505.13755
Reposted by William Gilpin
spintheory.bsky.social
I'm excited to say that one of the most exploratory and thought-provoking papers I've worked on in recent years was just accepted at Physical Review Research.

Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.21072

#physics #innovation 🧪🦋 @apsphysics.bsky.social
Innovation-exnovation dynamics on trees and trusses
Innovation and its complement exnovation describe the progression of realized possibilities from the past to the future, and the process depends on the structure of the underlying graph. For example, ...
arxiv.org
July 8, 2025 at 8:06 PM
Reposted by William Gilpin
texasscience.bsky.social
Kudos to Edoardo Baldini, William Gilpin & Daehyeok Kim on earning Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation!

#NSF #CAREERAwards #EarlyCareerDevelopment #TexasScience @wgilpin.bsky.social @utphysics.bsky.social
cns.utexas.edu/news/accolad...
Three College of Natural Sciences Faculty Win NSF CAREER Awards
3 UT faculty in computer science and physics won an NSF award recognizing their potential to serve as academic role models.
cns.utexas.edu
August 21, 2025 at 4:46 PM
wgilpin.bsky.social
Does stability matter in biology? My article on the cover of this month’s @PLOSCompBiol explores how large ecosystems develop supertransients, a manifestation of computational hardness (1/N)

doi.org/10.1371/jour...
June 16, 2025 at 5:30 PM
wgilpin.bsky.social
We present Panda: a foundation model for nonlinear dynamics pretrained on 20,000 chaotic ODE discovered via evolutionary search. Panda zero-shot forecasts unseen ODE best-in-class, and can forecast PDE despite having never seen them during training (1/8)
arxiv.org/abs/2505.13755
May 22, 2025 at 4:49 AM
Reposted by William Gilpin
jdyeakel.bsky.social
New preprint! Population sizes are unknowable for many species... but is low-res information still useful for exploring dynamics?
We model species as either high or low in abundance—a useful way to explore how food web structure impacts extinction risk and trophic cascades:
arxiv.org/abs/2502.11220
Coarse-Graining Cascades Within Food Webs
Quantifying population dynamics is a fundamental challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology, particularly for species that are cryptic, microscopic, or extinct. Traditional approaches rely on conti...
arxiv.org
February 18, 2025 at 9:42 PM
wgilpin.bsky.social
In biology we measure downstream variables like genes, neurons, or species. But we can’t always measure their underlying causes. In Physical Review X I present a physics-based algorithm for learning causal drivers from time series (1/n)

go.aps.org/3PwXhxe
January 15, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by William Gilpin
ohallats.bsky.social
After a long and winding odyssey, excited to finally drop anchor in open-access waters. This preprint shows how neutral allele frequency time series can illuminate disease transmission rates between communities— key for epidemic fore- & backcasting. medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵
December 6, 2024 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by William Gilpin
tzerhan29.bsky.social
Interested in active matter/biophysics? Our lab tzerhan.com is looking for motivated PhD students to join our nonreciprocal robotics active matter/chiral jamming/morphogenesis projects. Apply by Dec 18: physics.ucsd.edu/students/gra...
HOME | Living Matter Lab
tzerhan.com
November 20, 2024 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by William Gilpin
clairewyart.bsky.social
Individuality is fascinating. We found how to quantify variability among individuals by identifying long-lasting motor strategies during navigation. Work of Dr. Gautam Sridhar and Dr. Antonio Costa in collab with João Marques @daniobrain.bsky.social out today in #PNAS ! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
When animals deploy motor strategies to navigate and adapt to changing environments and their own experiences, their behavior is highly variable across multiple timescales and from one animal to another. Using high-fidelity Markov models of behavior, we reveal the main modes along which zebrafish generate motor strategies in different environments. We uncover essential principles underlying navigation and reveal that an individual’s past experience, or its current inner state alters preferences for long-lasting motor strategies. This study sets the stage for general approaches to dissect the origin of variability of navigation among individuals. --- To reveal structure in individual variability, we build Markov models of action sequences that bridge across timescales and enable the comparison of behavioral phenotypes among individuals. Applied to zebrafish responding to diverse sensory cues, we uncover a hierarchy of long-lived motor strategies, dominated by changes in orientation distinguishing cruising versus wandering. While fish cruise in the light, they wander in response to aversive stimuli, or in search for appetitive prey. As our method encodes the behavioral dynamics of each individual fish in the transitions among coarse-grained motor strategies, we use it to uncover a hierarchical structure in the phenotypic variability that reflects exploration–exploitation trade-offs. The major source of variation among fish is driven by prior or immediate exposure to prey that induces exploitation phenotypes. A large degree of variability not explained by environmental cues unravels hidden states that override the sensory context to induce contrasting exploration–exploitation phenotypes. Altogether, by extracting the timescales of motor strategies deployed during navigation, our approach exposes structure among individuals and reveals internal states tuned by prior experience.
November 16, 2024 at 9:22 PM
Reposted by William Gilpin
tjalamont.bsky.social
An amazing sight from my recent Brazil trip: bioluminescent termite mounds in Emas National Park. Tiny larvae of click beetles (Pyrearinus termitilluminans) glow steadily, hoping to attract flying insects (like winged termites & ants), which they then grab with their sharp mandibles. #insects 🐙🌿
A macro photo taken at night of a green-glowing, bioluminescent click beetle larva, partially outside its burrow in a red-dirt termite mound. The beetle larva has sharp, wide open mandibles, ready to snap shut on any insect that ventures too close, attracted by the light. A photo at night of a tall termite mound on a grassland. The cloudy sky is faintly blue in the background. The termite mound is dotted with a few dozen green pinpoints of light, all from tiny bioluminescent click beetle larvae living in the mound's surface, giving the termite mound the appearance of lumpy, red-dirt Christmas tree.
November 15, 2024 at 8:38 PM
wgilpin.bsky.social
Is chaos an analogue sampling scheme? I wrote a Perspective for Nature Reviews Physics
discussing connections between classical work on information flow in nonlinear systems, and modern generative ML models

www.nature.com/articles/s42...
February 15, 2024 at 7:11 PM
Reposted by William Gilpin
siavasha.bsky.social
If you are attending SICB please stop by our poster. Haley and Bryant are looking forward to co-presenting our work. #SICB2024
January 3, 2024 at 4:48 AM