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! 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.