Abhishek has been a PhD candidate at the Complexity Science Hub since August 2026.

He is primarily interested in distributed coordination, a phenomenon that involves aggregating distributed information to make decisions, guide behavior, and coordinate actions. Within human social systems, examples include market mechanisms determining the prices of commodities; voting systems aggregating varied preferences; and organizations decomposing and arranging know-how among departments and employees, enabling them to coordinate projects that would otherwise be impossible. Each of these systems takes enormously varied forms in reality. Yet the general principles of distributed computation underpin many such complex systems and therefore place constraints on how those systems can behave.

As a starting point, Abhishek draws on the theory of distributed computing, which provides formal tools for studying distributed coordination and computation. He is exploring how these tools—together with ideas from computational complexity—can be translated or extended to study coordination in social and economic systems.

Before joining the Complexity Science Hub, Abhishek was a graduate fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Under the supervision of Prof. David Wolpert, he developed theoretical frameworks for studying the energetic costs underlying computation. This work also formed part of his master’s thesis. He received his BS-MS degree with a major in Physics from IISER Kolkata, India, in 2024.