Message from the President

Welcome to NECSI. We invite your participation in our research, education and community building activities. We at the New England Complex Systems Institute are proud of our contributions to developing new insights for understanding complex systems, demonstrating the importance of these insights for advances in science, and for addressing major problems of social concern. Having powerful new tools leads to an imperative, a responsibility, to work toward a better world.

Science enables us to answer questions about the world. Complex systems are all around us in the natural physical and biological world, in the social systems that we are part of, and in the technological systems that we create. Our minds and bodies, the global economy, the internet, and our healthcare system are remarkable systems. We are them, live in them and depend on them. When they do not work well, we are in trouble. At NECSI, the questions we ask are about how the systems around us behave the way they do---and when they don't function well, how we might improve them. Answering questions about the rich interdependencies and collective behaviors in complex systems requires new scientific strategies. We are opening new arenas for scientific inquiry. We have also demonstrated that key social concerns in healthcare, education, military, management, third world development, and ethnic violence, can be the subject of science. The behavior of systems is not a mystery, it is a science. We can use our new understanding to develop policy and interventions to improve the complex world around us.

Among the greatest fears today are global problems of climate change, environmental destruction, pandemics and endemic health, energy and other resource exhaustion, economic disasters, and global conflict including terrorism. Our best hope to avoid major disasters is through understanding the vulnerabilities of our world and civilization. People frequently lament the increasingly complex nature of the world, which reflects new dependencies and vulnerabilities. However, though complexity may be overwhelming and create risks, it is not necessarily a bad thing. The current state of the world is a reflection of the global community working together to make the world run.

I first became excited about the possibilities of the study of complex systems over twenty years ago, and since that time I've witnessed the growing recognition of the importance this field can play. Ten years ago, thinking about complex systems was still a pioneering domain. Today, it has found its way into the university classroom, into the corporate world, and the plans of government agencies. Complex systems science is maturing into a new and distinct scientific discipline---one that is relevant to all of the traditional disciplines of science.

When compared to the typical university or research institution, NECSI is in a unique position to address issues of complexity in both our scientific understanding of the world, and in the application of science to social challenges. Our new tools overcome the limitations of classical approximations for the scientific study of complex systems, such as social organizations, biological organisms and ecological communities. NECSI's unified mathematically-based approach transcends the boundaries of physical, biological and social sciences, as well as engineering, management, and medicine.

This unique approach to the field of complex systems has been welcomed by the complexity community and beyond. At present, the NECSI community extends far beyond the staff and researchers housed in our Cambridge facility. There are over 1500 alumni of our complex systems educational programs, dozens of academic affiliates at other institutions around the world, and thousands of participants in the International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS).

Our website is an expression of our unique mission, and I invite you to investigate our research, educational programs, and news about our organization. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please contact us at web@necsi.edu. If you wish to participate in our research and educational programs please contact us for the opportunities we are happy to extend to you to become a member of our fruitful community.