Our multidisciplinary team consists of physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and experts from life sciences and economics.
Our aim is to contribute to an understanding of the nature of complex adaptive systems and to use our insights for applications in life sciences, social science and economics. We maintain close relations to the Santa Fe Institute and several European research initiatives.
Our recent research topics include:
Complex Living Matter
- Artificial Cell: We simulate cells in silico to understand their dynamical stability, modes of operation and transitions to pathologic states.
- Genomics: We reverse-engineer genetic regulatory networks from omics data.
- Biological Time-Series: We use novel statistical tools toward unbiased approaches to functional brain imaging.
Complex Social Systems
- Measuring Societies: We measure and model the dynamics of social human interactions and aggregate phenomena.
- Financial Markets: We understand economy as macroscopic dynamical systems which emerge from microscopically interacting agents.
- Efficiency and Bureaucracy: We employ tools from network analysis and agent-based models to analyse flows of information within institutions, firms or bureaucratic bodies.
Physics of Complex Systems
- Statistical Mechanics: We fight for an understanding of strongly correlated statistical systems.
- Network Theory: We analyse, understand and manage network formation dynamics and the co-evolution of network structure and its function.
- Systemic Risk: We try to understand the preconditions under which collapse of complex systems becomes possible and likely.
- Physics of Evolution: We search for physical principles and mathematical descriptions of evolution systems. These range from biological evolution to Schumpeterian economics.