I work as a software architect and developer at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in Berlin, alongside an ongoing guest researcher affiliation with the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. My work combines network analysis, agent-based modeling, and natural language processing to study how scientific knowledge forms, spreads, and changes over time.
I studied physics at the Technische Universität Berlin and, on exchange, at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. In 2013 I completed my PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) with a dissertation on collective and critical effects in bosonic transport — quantum effects in heat transport at atomic scales — followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden.
From 2015 I worked as a freelance programmer, developing a prototype tangible musical interface based on RFID technology. In 2016 I joined the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin as a postdoctoral researcher and research software engineer, working with the Cluster of Excellence Topoi at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on research data infrastructure. I subsequently moved into the research program History of the Max Planck Society, working on large-scale analysis of archival data, before becoming postdoc and then principal investigator of the BMBF-funded ModelSEN project on socio-epistemic networks. From 2023 I was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, working on modeling the evolution of knowledge in the Anthropocene; I remain affiliated there as a guest researcher. That work also has a public-facing side: Tipping Pigs is a serious game I built about ecological tipping points, communicating the same kind of cascading, hard-to-reverse dynamics through play. Since September 2026 I work as a software architect and developer at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) in Berlin in the TELOTA project.
ModelSEN developed the socio-epistemic networks (SEN) framework: a way of formally describing historical knowledge systems along three interconnected layers — social, semiotic (material), and semantic — so that network studies from different historical case studies become comparable. Methodologically, it combines social network analysis, diffusion theory, and graph theory with ontology-based semantic modeling, grounded in case studies from the history of science. Software built along the way includes CitationNet, an interactive 3D visualization of citation networks, semanticlayertools, a Python toolkit for building the framework’s network layers from any structured text corpus, and RDMHelper, a set of tools for research data management.
I am a member of DHTech, the German Digital Humanities association DHd, and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. Within DHTech I take part in the community code review process, both submitting my own code for review and reviewing others'.
Portrait: © Hans Sell, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
Methods and tools I work with:
