Topics for Bachelor's or Master's Theses

We invite students from various disciplines to collaborate with us on one of the following topics (and others, see, e.g., publications) as their Bachelor's or Master's Thesis or during a not-too-short internship (feel free to contact us for further topics):

Note: Although we are principally open to students from all academic fields related to our interdisciplinary research copan color logo smallarea, students from a field that routinely applies mathematical modelling and analysis and computer simulations will find it much easier to meet the requirements for successful work on these topics.

Note: please send all requests on student research projects at copan to both Jobst Heitzig and Jonathan Donges (i.e. CC both in emails)!

Project topics include:

  • Complex social-ecological systems dynamics
  • Development and analysis of network models of interacting agents applied to problems of climate change mitigation, sustainability transformations, decarbonization, forms of social tipping dynamics etc.
  • Modelling of the World-Earth system in the Anthropocene
  • Dynamics of climate and social tipping elements and their interactions in the Earth system
  • Development of theoretical frameworks and quantitative measures of concepts such as social-ecological resilience, agency, responsibility etc.

Methods applied include:

  • Complex systems theory
  • Network theory
  • Dynamical systems and nonlinear dynamics
  • Statistical physics
  • Earth system modelling
  • Climate physics
  • Game theory
  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence

Check here for successfully completed Bachelor, Master and PhD theses completed at COPAN.