Professor Bar-Yam is Associate of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University
chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems, and managing editor of InterJournal.
Professor Bar-Yam is interested in 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 is interested in 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 quantitiative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to physical, biological and social systems. Leading up to his interest in complex systems he worked on the properties of defects in semiconductors, amorphous materials, surfaces and material growth, polymer dynamics, and neural network.