The Network Science Institute made a significant mark at the 2025 NetSci Conference held in Maastricht, The Netherlands from June 2-6, 2025. The conference highlighted the interdisciplinary nature of modern network science, with NetSI researchers and students contributing to everything from fundamental mathematical frameworks to practical applications in public health, social policy, criminal justice, and education. Through satellite sessions, invited talks, and poster presentations, their work exemplifies how network science continues to serve as a powerful lens for understanding complex systems across various domains.

Leading Satellite Sessions

Brooke Foucault Welles and Milo Trujillo co-organized the Software and Data for Supporting Network Science satellite, addressing the critical need to bridge communication between software users and developers in network science. This event tackled the sustainability challenges facing research software tools that are essential for network science but often undervalued in academic settings.

Sagar Kumar delivered a standout presentation titled "A Blue Start", introducing a groundbreaking dataset from the Bluesky social media platform. The project addresses the gap between traditional pairwise network data and higher-order interactions by analyzing 26.7 million users, 1.6 billion following relationships, and over 301,000 user-curated groups called "starter packs" - providing an essential resource for studying higher-order network science.

Andreia Sofia Teixeira served as keynote speaker for the Women in Network Science (WiNS) satellite, co-organized by Remy LeWinter, which focused on supporting early career researchers through lightning talks and poster sessions designed to foster multidisciplinary feedback and professional networking. Prof. Teixeira also spoke at the Net4Health satellite, presenting "Designing and Evaluating HIV Prevention Policies Using Contact Patterns and Network Simulations.", demonstrating how network-based frameworks can optimize HIV prevention strategies, showing that non-selective pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) distribution may be more effective than risk-based approaches, particularly in marginalized populations facing stigma and complex social dynamics. Additionally, Dr. Teixeira co-organized the FRIENDS satellite (Frameworks, Research and applIcations in complEx Networks with signeD edgeS), exploring the unique mathematical models and applications of signed networks containing both positive and negative links.

The conference featured several other notable contributions at satellite sessions addressing key areas of research in network science:

Dima Krioukov presented  “Discrete versus continuous geometry, part II” at the Network Geometry: Theory and Applications satellite that brought together researchers working on geometric interpretations of networks, spanning from network embeddings to higher-order interactions, with applications in neuroscience, biomedicine, and telecommunications.

TopoNets 2025, co-organized by Iacopo Iacopini, Giovanni Petri, focused on networks beyond pairwise interactions, examining how higher-order structures enhance our understanding of complex biological, social, and technological systems. The session highlighted recent advances in structural measures and generative models for these complex systems and Marilyn Gatica contributed with the talk “Exploring the Impact of Higher-Order Interactions in Neuroscience”.

The Network Renormalization satellite explored different techniques for understanding multiscale structures and hierarchical organization in complex systems, from brain networks to financial systems and machine learning applications. Giovanni Petri gave a presentation on “Renormalization and Higher-Order Interactions: Bridging Structure and Dynamics in Complex Systems”.

The The Network/Complex Nature of Criminal Activity satellite, co-organized by Wang Ngai Yeung, examined crime from a complex systems perspective, exploring how network analysis can reveal patterns in criminal behavior and inform more effective prevention strategies.

Evelyn Panagakou was the lead organizer of the NetSciEd 2025 satellite that focused on the intersection of network science and education, covering both how to teach network science (including K-12 curriculum development) and how to apply network science methods to understand and improve educational systems, with topics ranging from ethics in complexity science to educational segregation and interdisciplinary STEM training.

Wide-ranging Research Contributions

NetSI researchers contributed extensively to the poster sessions, showcasing work across multiple domains:

• Garbage in Garbage out: Impacts of data quality on criminal network intervention - Wang Ngai Yeung, Riccardo Di Clemente, Renaud Lambiotte
• Information Loss in Models of Communication Across Populations - Sagar Kumar, Moritz Laber, Maimuna Majumder, Brooke Foucault Welles
• Modeling institutional prestige through inter-university collaboration networks - Lochan Chaudhari, Rodrigo Dorantes-Gilardi, Brennan Klein
• Inferring Characteristics of Contact Patterns from Epidemic Data Using Edge-Based compartmental model and Dynamical Survival Analysis - Jose Andres Guzman Moran, Gyeong Ho Park, Federico Malizia, Diana Cole, Boseung Choi, István Kiss
• Impact of Network Structure on HIV Transmission and PrEP Strategies Among MSM - João Brázia, Andreia Sofia Teixeira, Alexandre Francisco
• Using an Occupation Co-Occurrence Network to Understand Labor Market Evolution - Samuel Westby, Alicia Sasser Modestino
• One rule does not fit all: deviations from universality in human mobility modeling - Ludovico Napoli, Marton Karsai, Esteban Moro
• Hypergraph Convolutional Neural Network with Edge-Dependent Vertex Weight for Node Classification applications - Tamanna Urmi, Xiyu Yang, Sharaj Kunjar
• Network perspective on the evolution and integration of the hippocampus representation - Giulia Lorenzini, Giuseppe Gava, Nicola Pedreschi, Pavel Perestenko, Renaud Lambiotte, Giovanni Petri
• Explaining comment thread popularity on Reddit: Structural, temporal and textual features - Wang Ngai Yeung, Andrew Nicholas Withers Hone, Renaud Lambiotte, Riccardo Di Clemente
• Causal Inference in the City: Evaluation of Policy Interventions' Impact using Mobility Networks - Bijin Joseph, Hamish Gibbs, Takahiro Yabe, Esteban Moro
• Random directed and undirected hypergraphs - Tiziano Squartini, Fabio Saracco, Anna Gallo, Paolo Barucca, Giovanni Petri, Renaud Lambiotte
• Growing unlabeled networks - Harrison Hartle, Brennan Klein, Paul Krapivski, Dmitri Krioukov
• A review of coarse-graining methods: insights from physics, network science and computer science - Alberto Aleta, Louis Boucherie, Lochan Chaudhari, A. Arribas, M. Fernández da Silva, Irene Ferri, Ariadna Fosch, V. Freitas, Harrison Hartle, Brennan Klein, Alessandra Urbinati, Erik Weis, Sara Venturini

The talks and presentations contributed to topics ranging from mobility and spatial networks, to machine learning, statistical analysis, higher order and multilayer networks, and contagion dynamics.

• Behavior-based contact structure in mobility networks - Esteban Moro‍
• Multilayer Network Clustering to Assess Epidemic Model Dependence - Abby Leung‍
• Decoding how higher-order network interactions shape complex contagion dynamics - István Kiss‍
• Higher-Order Network Effects on Information Access Equality & Efficiency - Samantha Dies‍
• Generalization and Efficiency of Graph Neural ODEs for Network Dynamical Systems - Moritz Laber
• Regionalization via nonparametric community detection in spatially embedded networks - Erik Weis

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NetSci 2026

The Network Science Institute at Northeastern University will host NetSci 2026, marking the 20^th anniversary of the conference, a milestone gathering expected to draw over 1,000 attendees from around the world. We look forward to welcoming the global network science community to Boston, where we will continue building on the field's momentum through satellite sessions, invited talks, research presentations, and collaborative opportunities that exemplify the interconnected spirit of network science itself.
More information will be shared in the coming weeks.

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