Speakers

Professor Ed Bullmore was trained in clinical medicine at the University of Oxford and St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and then worked as a Lecturer in Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, before an specialist clinical training in psychiatry at St George’s Hospital and then the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital London. He has done pioneering works in both basic and applied neuroscience.

His research career started in the early 1990s as a Wellcome Trust (Advanced) Research Fellow and was initially focused on mathematical analysis of neurophysiological time series. Since moving to Cambridge as Professor of Psychiatry in 1999, his interest in human brain function and structure has increasingly focused on complex brain networks identified in MRI and other brain scanning data. Since 2005, he has worked half time for GlaxoSmithKline as Head of GSK’s Clinical Unit in Cambridge. He is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust/GSK funded training Programme in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, Clinical Director of the Wellcome Trust/MRC funded Behavioral & Clinical Neuroscience Institute, and an honorary Consultant Psychiatrist and Director of R&D in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Foundation NHS Trust.

He has published about 350 scientific papers and he has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Professora Raissa D´Souza research focuses on mathematical models of self-organization, phase transitions, and the structure and function of networked systems. Her publications span the fields of Statistical Physics, Theoretical Computer Science and Applied Math, and appear in journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature Physics, and Physical Review Letters. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT in 1999, then was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories, and later at Microsoft Research. She currently serves on the editorial board of several international Journals and is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems.

She is actually member of the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports, Associate Editor of the Journal of Complex Networks, managing Editor of Internet Mathematics, and member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. She has published several papers and received numerous academic honors such as: Winner, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2013, National Academy of Sciences of U.S.A., Kavli Fellow, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2011, among others. She was the main organizer of NetSci 2014 in Berkeley, California.

Professor Jordi García –Ojalvo is the Head of Dynamical Systems Biology Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. The activity of the lab is devoted to study the dynamics of nonlinear and stochastic systems, with a specific emphasis on the implications of dynamical behavior in neuronal and cellular systems. García-Ojalvo´s scientific research is focused on the dynamics of living systems, from unicellular organisms to human beings. He is specialized in the use of dynamical phenomena to identify the molecular mechanisms of cellular processes, such as: decision-making in bacteria, spatial self-organization in bacterial biofilms, and pluripotency and tissue homeostasis in stem cells. He also works on modeling the time-varying response of the immune system to cytokine signaling, at the level of both single cells and cellular populations, on developing a global description of brain activity by means of mesoscopic neural-mass models and in applying the knowledge gained from these studies in systems neuroscience to investigate the computational abilities of single cells within a Systems Biology perspective.

Professor Jordi García-Ojalvo has published over 200 scientific articles in prestigious Journals like: Nature, Science, Cell, Plos Biology, PNAS and Physical Review Letters, among others. Together with other Spanish and American scientists, he has discovered that bacteria build up large structures with dead cells to defend themselves against antibiotics or other external agents. He has led several national and international projects and written numerous reviews, tutorials, monographs, books and book chapters. García-Ojalvo is a reviewer of more than 30 scientific journals and editor of 3 international journals.

Professor Jürgen Kurths studied Mathematics at the University of Rostock. In 1991, he was selected to become a Director of a new Group on Nonlinear Dynamics. In 1994, he got a Full-chair on Theoretical Physics/Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Potsdam. There, he was also Dean of the Science Faculty (1996–1999), and established as the founding Director the Interdisciplinary Centre for Dynamics of Complex Systems (1994–2008). He was also the founding Director of the Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam. In 2008 he was called to recreate the research domain Trans-disciplinary Concepts at PIK and has become a Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at the Institute of Physics at the Humboldt University, Berlin and in 2009, a 6th Century chair for Complex Systems Biology at the Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology at Kings College of the Aberdeen University (UK).

Prof. Jürgen Kurths has been noted especially for his seminal contributions to new synchronization phenomena, recurrence, coherence resonance, etc. as well as dynamics and stability of complex networks. He published more than 500 articles and 8 books. He is currently in the editorial board of more than 10 scientific journals.

Jürgen Kurths is an elected Fellow of the APS (1999). He got an Alexander von Humboldt research award from CSIR (India) in 2005. He has become a member of the Academia Europaea in 2010, and of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2012. He was also bestowed with a Dr. Honoris Causa from the Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod in 2008, and one from the Chernishevsky University, Saratov. He is honorary professor at the University of Postdam and guest professor at the Southeast University in Nanjing. He was awarded the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2013.

Professor Vespignani received his undergraduate degree and PhD, both in Physics from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He completed his postdoctoral research at Yale University and Leiden University. Vespignani worked at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (UNESCO) in Trieste and at the University of Paris-Sud in France as a member of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) before moving to Indiana University in 2004. Before joining Northeastern University Vespignani was J. H. Rudy Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University and serving as the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and the Associate Director of the Pervasive Technology Institute.

His research activity focuses on the interdisciplinary application of statistical and numerical simulation methods, the analysis of epidemic and spreading phenomena and the study of biological, social and technological networks. For several years, he has been working on the characterization and modeling of the Internet, the WWW and large-scale information networks. He is now focusing his activity in modeling the spatial spread of epidemics, including the realistic and data-driven computational modeling of emerging infectious diseases, the resilience of complex networks and the behavior of techno-social systems. Prof. Vespignani has published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers in top rated scientific journals (PNAS, Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, etc.) and he is serving in the board/leadership of a variety of professional association and journals.

He is elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, member of the Academy of Europe, and Fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is serving in the Board/leadership of a variety of professional association and journals and the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Italy. He is also the President of the Complex Systems Society.