Welcome!

This is the personal homepage of Lazaros Gallos. I am currently a Research Associate at the Levich Institute of the City College of New York, working with Prof. Hernan Makse.
I received my PhD in Computational Physics from the Physics Dept. in Univ. of Thessaloniki (advisor Prof. Panos Argyrakis).

My interests are broad and cover a lot of inter-disciplinary ground. For the last few years I have been working on complex networks science. Currently, I work on (a) understanding fundamental mechanisms behind online social interactions, (b) epidemics spreading, and (c) modules organization in the brain.

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Obesity spreading

We recently finished a work on how obesity, health indicators, economic indicators, etc spread geographically. For obesity, we find strong spatial correlations that extend up to 1000 miles. This suggests that the obesity epidemic is a collective phenomenon.

Online social interactions

What are our motivations in choosing our online friends? In our recent paper we study high-quality data and show how we can estimate the influence of different social drivers. In simpler words, how probable is it that we reply to friend requests or how often do we connect to popular people? Although we may not realize this, our connections evolve and we may find ourselves in an environment different from our choices.

Granovetter in the brain

Brain presents a conundrum: we need isolated modules to process information, but brain should exhibit a unified picture. Our network analysis of fMRI data suggests that brain modules are fractal (large-world) but they are connected through lower-strength connections, that result in a global small-world network. This is a concept similar with Granovetter's 'strength of the weak ties' in social networks.

Connections aren't everything

You want to spread a message in a social network. What would be your choice of the starting point for more efficient spreading? Surprisingly, it is not always the most connected individual; location can be more important than the number of connections.

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