Message from the Director

Welcome to the website of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences!

Our center was founded in 1985 by J. A. Scott Kelso. He applies ideas from physics, using dynamics, the mathematics of how things change in time, to understand how people move and sense the world around them.

The spirit of our Center is summarized by my favorite quotation, which is from the social psychologist Abraham Maslow, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail."

At our Center there are scientists from many different fields, including psychologists, laboratory biologists, theoretical physicists, applied mathematicians, and even one astronomer. We work together to study and teach about "complex systems", which are things with many parts that interact strongly with each other, such as genes, cells, and brains. Our central interest is one of the most complex systems of them all, the human brain. We use computational models and medical imaging to understand how parts of the brain are connected and how they work together.

The scientists at our Center, together with the cellular and molecular neuroscientists in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, the behavioral psychologists in the Department of Psychology, and the biophysicists in the Department of Physics; form a new and strong program in the Neural Sciences at Florida Atlantic University.

Through our Ph.D. program we are also training a new generation of scientists. Not just scientists with a narrowly defined expertise, but scientists who are both mathematically and biologically literate, who can fully participate in true multi-disciplinary research to understand the intricate and beautiful dance performed by the genes, cells, and brains inside of us and around us.

I welcome you to view our website to learn more about our Center, attend our seminars, or apply to study in our Ph.D. program.

Larry S. Liebovitch, Ph.D., Director