• Ph.D. Physics, Imperial College, London, 1996.
• Postdoctoral Research:
  • Director's Fellow, Theoretical Division at LANL 1997-1999.
  • Slansky Fellow, Theoretical Division at LANL 1999-2000.
  • Senior Postdoctoral Associate, Center for Theoretical Physics, MIT 2000-2003.
• Technical Staff Member, Mathematical Modeling and Analysis Group, Theoretical Division
• External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute [effective July 2007]
• Research Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University

Research Interests:

• Fundamental aspects of nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, complex systems
• Memory and information processing in living neuronal networks
• Real time epidemiology, emerging infectious diseases and pathogen evolution
• Urban organization and dynamics, population and economic growth, sustainability
• The social dynamics of innovation and scientific discovery
• Distributed sensor networks and aridland ecology

Selected Recent Publications:

1. Bettencourt LM, Lobo J, Helbing D, Kuhnert C, West GB (2007) Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA PMID 17438298.
2. Bettencourt LM, Stephens GJ, Ham MI, Gross GW (2007) Functional structure of cortical neuronal networks grown in vitro. Phys Rev E 75, 021915.
3. Bettencourt LM, Cintron-Arias A, Kaiser DI., and Castillo-Ch‡vez C (2006) The power of a good idea: quantitative modeling of the spread of ideas from epidemiological models. Physica A 364 513Ð536.
4. Bettencourt LM, Hagberg A, and Larkey L (2007) Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Practical Anomaly Detection Schemes in Ecological Applications of Distributed Sensor Networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (in print).
5. Bettencourt LM, Ribeiro RM, Chowell G, Lant T, and Castillo-Chavez C (2007) Towards real time epidemiology: data assimilation, modeling and anomaly detection of health surveillance data streams. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (in print).
6. Bettencourt LM, Lobo, J and Strumsky D (2007) Invention in the City: Increasing Returns to Scale in Metropolitan Patenting, Research Policy 36 107-120.
7. Chowell G, Nishiura H, Bettencourt LM (2007) Comparative estimation of the reproduction number for pandemic influenza from daily case notification data. J. Roy. Soc. Interface 4 155-166.