I build simulation models of systems that are too tangled to reason about directly — how a landscape changes when thousands of smallholder farmers each make their own decisions, and what that does to the diseases moving through it.
M.Sc. in Biology and Ecology, B.Sc. in Computer Science. Mostly Python, R and Julia, with a side of JavaScript when something needs to be usable by people who don't code.
📍 Israel · ✍️ yuvalbloch.com
Most of my research code lives under lab and collaboration organisations, so it doesn't show up on this profile. The good stuff is here:
🌍 Madagascar land-use change model A multiscale cellular automata–Markov model of smallholder shifting cultivation and vanilla agroforestry in north-eastern Madagascar, coupled to tick population dynamics to project rickettsial disease exposure under land-use scenarios. My M.Sc. thesis — designed, built and documented single-handedly. Part of the international EEID Madagascar project.
📊 Figaro · live app · write-up A browser-based editor for composing multi-panel scientific figures — build a grid, assign charts, load data, export, and keep your layout when the data changes. Built in a lab hackathon with three labmates, where I was the most experienced developer and led the technical decisions. React, Vite, Zustand, Plotly, plus an R package.
🕸️ MiRA · live app · preprint Browser-based interactive visualisation for multilayer networks in ecology and biology, led by Shir Nehoray. I worked on deployment, testing and packaging — the part that turned it from a prototype into something a stranger can open and use. Second author on the preprint.
📰 LEAN A self-hosted daily news pipeline: fetches RSS, filters and ranks with Claude, and emails a calm HTML digest each morning. Built around one idea — stay informed without being emotionally manipulated. Why I built it.
Link prediction in plant–pollinator networks — can you predict the interactions a pollination survey missed, from network structure alone? Power-law degree fitting and modularity analysis on the Doñana network, then a bake-off between Node2Vec, PCA, hand-built heuristics and a from-scratch SEAL graph neural network. Four simple heuristics beat the GNN, and the model transfers to an ecosystem thousands of kilometres away.
Medusa Resume — a MERN resume-building application with a PDF editor and a job-listing crawler, built at 2019.
I write at yuvalbloch.com about modelling, ecology, and the tools I actually use — including what three years of thesis writing taught me and running a censorship-circumvention proxy from a spare browser tab.