Yaneer Bar-Yam

Yaneer Bar-Yam
Bar-Yam (on the left) at 2014
Born	1959 (age 57–58) Boston, Massachusetts
Fields	Complex systems (Application to social, biological and physical systems)
Institutions	New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) (1997-today) Boston University (1991-1997)
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SB, PhD)
Thesis	Microscopic Theory of the Dynamics of Defects in Semiconductors. (1984)
Doctoral advisor	John Dimitris Joannopoulos
Doctoral students	Erik Rauch
Website necsi.edu/faculty/bar-yam.html

Yaneer Bar-Yam (born 1959) is an American physicist, systems scientist, and founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute.

Yaneer Bar-Yam was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1959. He received his B.S. degree in 1978 and his Ph.D. degree in 1984, both in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Bantrell PostDoctoral Fellow, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at MIT and IBM. In 1991, after a junior faculty appointment at the Weizmann Institute, he became an Associate Professor of Engineering at Boston University.

He left Boston University in 1997 to become president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is also an Associate of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He is chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems and managing editor of InterJournal.

Bar-Yam studies 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 studies 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 quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to physical, biological and social systems.

Bar-Yam has made further contributions to the theory of the structural and electronic dynamics of materials, the theory of polymer dynamics and protein folding, the theory of neural networks and structure-function relationships, the theory of quantitative multiscale complexity, and the theory of evolution.