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Cohort 2023
Dr. Li Wei Zhang
National University of Singapore
Computer Science→EcologyLeap 82
Impact summary
Published collapse-prediction models in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Models now used by Singapore's National Parks Board for forest corridor planning.
Background
Li Wei developed large-scale network algorithms for routing and traffic prediction. Her fellowship placement with NUS's Tropical Marine Science Institute was unconventional — she had never studied biology. But she quickly saw that species interaction networks behaved like distributed computing systems, and began applying graph neural networks to predict ecosystem collapse thresholds.
The leap story
“An ecosystem is a network. A species going extinct is a node failure. We already know a huge amount about how networks fail — we just hadn't applied it to forests.”