NETWORKS consortium receives COFUND grant from European Commission
The Gravitation programme NETWORKS has been awarded a COFUND grant of 3 million euros. Half of this comes from the European Commission's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, with industry partners paying the other half. Of the fourteen new PhD candidates, two will join Frank den Hollander's research group in Leiden.
The urgent challenges of complex networks
NETWORKS is a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University and Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI). The consortium was founded in 2014 out of an NWO Gravitation Grant of 22.7 million euros.
The consortium consists of some 50 researchers working on the urgent challenges that large-scale networks pose. Not only digital networks, but also traffic and transport networks, and electricity networks are often not well enough prepared for unexpected situations. The focus of the consortium is on modelling, understanding, controlling and optimising networks that are complex and highly volatile.
Two PhD candidates to Leiden
The 3 million euros will enable the consortium to expand its work and hire fourteen new PhD candidates, two of whom will be in Leiden. Frank den Hollander: 'The two Leiden positions will be recruited before and after the summer. The PhD candidates will work in my research group Probability Theory and will be supervised by assistant professors Luca Avena and Rajat Hazra. They will work on complex networks, in particular on spectral properties of neighbouring matrices of different classes of random graphs.'