Ekaterina (Kath) Landgren
I’m Ekaterina (Kath), and I am a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. I am working with Sara Constantino and Madalina Vlasceanu. I was previously at Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at University of Colorado Boulder, where I worked with Matt Burgess. Prior to joining CIRES, I received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University. I’ve used dynamical systems models to study a wide range of phenomena – from voter turnout to planets beyond our solar system. Currently I am bringing these interests together by investigating social aspects of climate change. This work combines two fundamental questions in my research: How do we move society toward large-scale solutions to the climate crisis? How does one’s position within a system influence their view of it? I am passionate about complex systems, open science, and interdisciplinary research.
For more about me, see my CV, or list of publications.
Research Interests
- Complex social systems
- opinion dynamics
- socio-environmental systems
- polarization
- Mathematics of climate
- conceptual climate models
- exoplanetary atmosphere dynamics
- Open science and open software
Upcoming
I will be attending NetSci2026 in Boston, MA in June and IC2S2 2026 in Burlington, VT in July.
News
May 2026 New paper! Optimal ambition in business, politics and life with Ryan E. Langendorf and Matthew G. Burgess. Out in Physical Review E. Read about it in The Guardian and New Scientist.
May 2026 New paper! U.S. television news coverage of climate change policy is aggregately balanced but polarized with Jeremiah Osborne-Gowey, Joshua Garland, Maxwell Boykoff, and Matthew G. Burgess. Out in Environmental Research Communications.
May 2026 New paper! Visualizing epidemiological models for policy: design principles for effective communication lead by Liza Hadley, with Nick Holliman, Kai Xu, Edyta Bogucka, Xinhuan Shu, Daniel Archambault, Ellen M DeGennaro, and Stephen Kissler. Out in Frontiers in Public Health.
April 2026 I gave a talk at the Sustainability Data Science Conference at Stanford University on “Climate attribution in local news coverage of natural hazards” and was selected for the Best Postdoc Presentation award!
April 2026 I attended the Micro Working Group on Robust Institutional Design in Expert–Decision Maker Systems at the Santa Fe Institute with Emma Zajdela, Adam Wiechman, Abigail Crocker, Jake Nichol, and Konrad Posch.
March 2026 New preprint! Consensus and fragmentation in academic publication preferences with Ian Van Buskirk, Marilena Hohmann, Johan Ugander, Aaron Clauset, and Dan Larremore.
March 2026 I presented virtually at Lund University’s COSHE seminar on “Perceived climate polarization from networks to newsrooms.”
March 2026 New SIAM News article! Modeling Social Systems: Transparency, Reproducibility, and Responsibility with Casa Matemática Oaxaca Workgroup on Collective Social Phenomena.
December 2025 I attended the Complex Networks Winter Workshop in Quebec City.
October 2025 I attended the Fall meeting of the SIAM Committee on Science Policy and visited YY Ahn’s lab at the University of Virginia.
September 2025 I moved to the Bay Area and started a postoctoral appointment at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability!
June 2025 I attended the Collective Social Phenomena: Dynamics and Data workshop at The Casa Matemática Oaxaca (CMO).
For older news, see the news archive.