Nitesh Patro, a graduate student in the Physics of Life program at ICTS, has been awarded the Carl Storm Fellowship to support his participation in the upcoming Gordon Research Conference on Stochastic Physics in Biology, scheduled to take place in January 2027.
The fellowship is highly competitive, with only one student selected at each conference. Nitesh will present a poster titled “Emergent Self-inhibition Governs the Landscape of Stable States in Complex Ecosystems,” based on work carried out in collaboration with Akshit Goyal and Washington Taylor (MIT, USA). The research explores how species-rich ecosystems can exist in multiple stable states and shows that states with higher total biomass are generally more likely to occur. It also introduces a simplified model that predicts these states using just two parameters: total biomass and the number of species.
ICTS congratulates Nitesh on this recognition of his research work, and Prof. Goyal for his mentorship and guidance.