Michelle Girvan

Michelle Girvan, born in 1977, is an American physicist and network scientist whose research combines methods from dynamical systems, graph theory and statistical mechanics and applies them to problems including epidemiology, gene regulation and the study of information cascades. She is one of the namesakes of the Girvan-Newman algorithm, a hierarchical method used to detect communities in complex systems. Girvan is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park.