Johannes Apelt

My work lies in the intersection of theoretical ecology and mathematics. In particular, I'm interested in mutualism, an interspecific interaction that enhances the fitness of both partners involved. To study this type of interaction I consider ODE systems that describe population dynamics. Main focus lies on the derivation and justification of models and their analysis with Tikhonov-Fenichel reductions. The main idea is to start with a complex but biologically realistic "super model" and consider its reductions arising from timescale separations. Thereby we obtain a simpler model, that still captures the essential behaviour of the original system. Thus, the underlying mathematical framework yields means of justifying and deriving new models and can be used to analyse the system in somewhat extreme parameter regions.

To find and compute model reductions in practice, I wrote a Julia package: github.com/jo-ap/TikhonovFenichelReductions.jl