Lord May examining CoMPLEX issues

The eminent academic Lord May of Oxford, President of the Royal Society, was the guest speaker at a seminar at UCL on 11 February 2004.

The talk was part of a seminar series organised by UCL's Centre for Mathematics & Physics in the Life Sciences & Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX), which was established in 1998 to encourage interdisciplinary science.

The centre is the first of its kind, and provides a forum for interdisciplinary teaching and research that is unique within the UK scientific community.

The seminar entitled 'The Nonlinear Dynamics of Vulnerability: How Systems, Whether Ecosystems, or IT Networks, or Transmission Networks for Infectious Diseases, Respond to Disturbance', examines how all three are examples of systems whose behaviour depends on the nature of the network of connections among nodes. However, research on these areas has hardly been applied to areas such as ecosystem resilience.

Lord May has been a physicist, an applied mathematician and a zoologist, and has managed to combine all three disciplines to examine how animal and plant populations operate. Before becoming President of the Royal Society, Lord May was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government. As a result, he was involved in some of the most public scientific issues of recent times, such as BSE and GM foods.

Apart from being of direct interest to many UCL departments such as Physics, Computer Science and Biology, the event should be of great interest many members of the public and the wider UCL community, given the nature of the speaker.

To find out more about the seminar or the centre, use the link below.

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Link: CoMPLEX