Yaneer Bar-Yam
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Yaneer Bar-Yam is founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Physics in 1984. He was a Bantrell PostDoctoral Fellow, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at MIT and IBM. After a junior faculty appointment at the Weizmann Institute, he became an Associate Professor of Engineering at Boston University in 1991. He left Boston University in 1997 to become president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is also Associate of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Harvard University. Prof. Bar-Yam studies the unified properties of complex systems as a systematic strategy for answering basic questions about the world. His research is focused both on formalizing complex systems concepts and relating them to everyday problems. In particular, he studies the relationship between observations at different scales, formal properties of descriptions of systems, the relationship of structure and function, the representation of information as a physical quantity, and quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to physical, biological and social systems. Prof. Bar-Yam has made contributions to: the theory of the structural and electronic dynamics of materials; the theory of polymer dynamics and protein folding; the theory of neural networks and structure-function relationships; the theory of quantitative multiscale complexity; and, the theory of evolution.
Professor Bar-Yam is is author of Making Things Work and Dynamics of Complex Systems. He is chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems and managing editor of InterJournal.
