Networks of many nonlinearly-coupled dynamical components are ubiquitous in the physical sciences, but often difficult to characterize. However, their dynamics are often low-dimensional, being dominated by a few functional, coherent patterns. We wish to understand: (1) How do nonlinear networks generate functional responses? ...

This thesis contains several projects under two main headings: data-driven modeling, and C. elegans applications. Most of these works build to the main core of this thesis: applying novel control theoretic methods to C. elegans Calcium imaging data. Sparse optimization techniques are used to provide a unsupervised solution ...