Colm Connaughton
About me
I am a theoretical physicist working at the pragmatic intersection of complex systems theory, data science and applied mathematics. I am currently the director of the London Mathematical Laboratory, an independent institute for mathematical sciences research in West London.
I am an emeritus professor of applied mathematics at the University of Warwick where I worked for many years as the director of the Warwick Centre for Complexity Science and the deputy director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Mathematics for Real World Systems.
I am a founding member of the Data Science for Social Good UK steering group. This is a multifaceted project to ensure that the revolutionary benefits of data science and AI do not accrue solely to commercial and technical organisations, but are also shared with non-profit and public sector organisations working for the common good.
I am also a co-director of FizzPOP CIC, a community project building a public makerspace for the Birmingham area.
Research
I am currently working primarily on the Ergodicity Economics programme at LML while also pursuing related interests in renewable energy and machine learning. My research page has a little more detail. In the past I have worked on various problems in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, kinetic theory, fluid dynamics, complex systems and data science. My publications page has a full list of my scientific contributions.
Recent items
Preprint
S Mitra, SE Lakhal, CP Connaughton, JE Sardonia, MM Bandi. 2026."A Two-Regime Statistical Framework for Wind-Power Distributions: From Wind-Speed Fluctuations to Turbine Control." arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.25863
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.25863Preprint
S Mitra, SE Lakhal, CP Connaughton, JE Sardonia, MM Bandi. 2026."Rician Distribution as a Physically Interpretable Model for Wind-Speed Statistics." arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.25840
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.25840Journal article
Benjamin Skjold, Simon Richard Steinkamp, Colm Connaughton, Oliver James Hulme, and Ole Peters. 2026.“Ergodicity Transformations Predict Human Decision-Making Under Risk.” PLOS Computational Biology 22 (7): e1014409.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014409.