This article is part of a larger project by The Michigan Daily to examine University of Michigan research trends by analyzing academic paper citations. The Michigan Daily spoke with Mark Newman, Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University professor of physics and one of the top ten most cited researchers connected to the University, to discuss his career and research. Read the other stories here.
Although he has been a professor of physics at the University of Michigan for more than two decades and holds a bachelor’s degree and a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, Mark Newman’s work cannot be summed up in a single word. In fact, Newman himself describes his line of physics as “nontraditional” as he applies statistical physics to social and informational problems. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Newman defined statistical physics as the field that predicts the behavior of networks or systems of people or things.
“Sometimes things are just too complicated to actually solve lots of equations and work out exactly what they’re going to do, but we may be able to predict what they’re going to do,” Newman said. “A simple example from everyday life would be an election poll, where I don’t know how the election is going to come out, but I can make a statistical prediction. … I do something sort of analogous to that, but with physical systems.”
Newman explained that the field of statistical physics, originally only intended to study gases, has existed for more than a century. However, researchers have since developed a variety of unique applications for these networks, known as complex systems.
“People have applied them to social systems, like connections of people, and to ecological systems and to interactions of ants and to cars on the highway and all sorts of things like that,” Newman said. “All of these are sort of generically, what we would call, complex systems, systems that are made up of many interacting parts. My work has been about the patterns of interactions between those parts … which can have a big effect on the way systems behave.”
Newman came to the United States from the United Kingdom to do postdoctoral work at Cornell University before taking a job as a researcher at the Sante Fe Institute in 1996. A think tank founded in 1984, the institute first cultivated his interest in complex systems, which Newman said has only grown since.
After six years at the Sante Fe Institute, Newman became an assistant professor at the University because of its Center for the Study of Complex Systems.
In his time as a researcher, Newman has amassed nearly 260,000 citations as of publication, according to Google Scholar. He credits the versatility of complex systems as one of the reasons why his work is highly cited by others.
“I think that one of the main things is that the kind of work I do has very wide applications in a lot of different fields,” Newman said. “The techniques that we develop, the mathematics and computer methods and so forth that we develop, can be applied by practitioners in many different fields. Maybe you are a public health person and you’re interested in how a pandemic is going to spread. Maybe you’re an ecologist and you’re interested in food webs and energy flows and ecosystems. Maybe you’re a computer scientist and you’re interested in how data is spreading on the internet so forth. All of these things can be treated using these network methods.”
Of his research, Newman said his most impactful and popular projects were on research collaborations and on computer modeling.
“In the early 2000s, I did some work on the networks of collaboration among scientists, and that’s sort of interesting because it’s one of the largest offline social networks ever studied,” Newman said. “I’ve done quite a lot of work on modeling of networks, (which have) been widely used.”
Newman’s work has also extended to the modeling of subcommunities that develop within complex systems, which he said has influenced a wide range of other research fields.
“I’ve done quite a lot of stuff on community structure in networks, which is when networks divide up into little separate subcommunities,” Newman said. “There’s a group of friends here who all know each other and a group of friends here who all know each other, stuff like that. That turns out to have a lot of applications, both in science but also in industry. So it’s been quite influential.”
Newman said citations are not a true measure of a researcher’s success and instead depend on the proportional size of an individual researcher’s area of study.
“Having all the citations isn’t necessarily the indicator of success and having few doesn’t mean you’re not successful,” Newman said. “There are plenty of people who do outstanding work, but they’re in smaller fields. There are not so many people working in that field, and then that means there’s just going to be fewer people available to cite their work. That doesn’t mean it’s not really important for the people that it’s important to.”
According to Newman, there is no specific or quantifiable path to success in research. Instead, he said asking intriguing questions and being passionate about particular fields of work would lead to personal fulfillment as a researcher.
“Being successful in research is a mixture of things,” Newman said. “Of course, it’s in part doing the work. … But I also think that it has to do with what area you work in, choosing an area that’s both of interest to you, so you’re excited to be working in it, and of interest to other people, so that your work actually has an impact.”
Newman said he attributes his individual accomplishments partially to luck and the path his career took after school. He said his favorite parts about being both a professor and a researcher come from mentoring students and exploring new questions on complex systems.
“The two things I like best about my job are when I find an interesting and exciting new research problem to work on,” Newman said. “I get very excited about that. And the other thing is teaching. I really enjoy working with the students, and that can be teaching in class but can also be working with the graduate students and undergraduates in my research group on whatever projects they’re working on, which is informal teaching. … Those two things are the most rewarding parts of the job for me.”
Daily News Editor Marissa Corsi can be reached at macorsi@umich.edu.
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