The University of Warwick (UW) leads the UK with a ground-breaking “Complexity Complex” to connect and develop interdisciplinary research in complexity science at all levels, train a new generation of complexity scientists via a doctoral training centre (DTC), understand, control and design complex systems, produce break-throughs in the principles and applications of complexity science, link with end-users as sources of real-world problems and beneficiaries from the resulting knowledge and trainees, and sustain a lively intellectual and practically based environment for complexity science. See the links on the left for more.

Background to Centre for Complexity Science

In 2005 we set up the "Complexity Complex", an association of research groups around campus active in Complexity Science, building on an ESRC-supported seminar series on "Socio-economic dynamics", two EC network projects coordinated from Warwick ("Unifying networks in science and society" and "Complex financial markets"), and activity in the Centre for Fusion, Space & Astrophysics, Information Systems Research Unit, Centre for Primary Health Care Studies, Systems Biology and others, with the goal of catalysing cross-disciplinary research in Complexity Science.

Warwick secured RCUK support for the start in early 2007 of six new faculty positions in Complexity Science, associated with the departments of Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, Engineering (including WMG), Medicine and Psychology. The three affiliated with Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science formed the basis for creation of our Centre for Complexity Science in 2007.

Our EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Complexity Science, awarded shortly afterwards, added another three permanent academic staff to the Centre for Complexity Science (funded by EPSRC for an initial 5 years), affiliated with Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, and focusses on training a large cohort of PhD students dedicated to Complexity Science, with an annual intake of 7-12 new students, including up to 10 per annum funded by EPSRC.

The Centre and DTC are housed in a dedicated extension to the Mathematics and Statistics building, into which we moved in 2008, connected to Computer Science, with Physics, Engineering and other relevant departments nearby.

The Centre has built up a postdoctoral research community of currently 5 members.

September 2010 saw the arrival of the first students on an Erasmus Mundus Masters Course on Complex Systems Science, that Warwick coordinates, joint with Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and Chalmers and Goteborg universities in Sweden.

Background to our initial bid

Need for capacity: There is an urgent national need, from industry, commerce, research institutions, academia, government and public services, for a new generation trained to understand how complex systems behave, how to live with them, to control them and to design them well. We see this in public service management, transport, public opinion, epidemics, riots, terrorism, and in nature from biomolecules to habitats, weather and climate. Equally important are the challenges of keeping up in technology, e.g. distributed computing, data management, process control, personalised medicine, disease management, environmental sensor swarms, complex materials, nano- & bio-technology, and radio frequency identification tagging.

Existing activities: UW is already well established in Complexity Research. It is the coordinating node of two EC NEST “Tackling Complexity in Science” networks (UNInet and Complex Markets) and of the international nodes of Australia’s “Complex Open Systems” network. Our Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics (CFSA) leads complex systems approaches to space plasmas and has major Science and Innovation (S&I) funding to build up fusion plasma research. Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) is at the forefront of innovating tools and techniques to handle operational complexity in industry, and UW led the UK with its ESRC-supported Socio-Dynamics seminar series and international conferences. Further strengths in Complexity Science are present in UW’s successful S&I bid in Discrete Mathematics and Applications, our Mathematical Interdisciplinary Research at Warwick (MIR@W) programme, Molecular Organisation and Assembly in Cells (MOAC) Life Sciences Interface DTC, Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC), S&I Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology (CRiSM), Centre for Primary Health Care Studies, Information Systems Research Unit (ISRU), the Ecology and Epidemiology group, and Warwick Systems Biology Centre together with its new Doctoral Training Centre.

Timeliness: A critical mass of activity in complexity science has been built by: connecting UW groups (by seminars, workshops and joint projects); launching the 2 EC networks last Summer; 3 recent S&I awards; and preparation for a Sept 06 EPSRC Training School and IMA+EC sponsored conference on “Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems”. We are now capitalising on this by a step change to a large and cohesive level. It is now time to establish an interwoven “Complexity Complex” to link the UW complexity community and attract a substantial tranche of top quality talent, from postgraduates to professors.

UW strategy: UW has invested heavily in interdisciplinary research and training over the last 5 years, examples including CSC with its EPSRC masters training package in High-end Scientific Computing, MOAC, the EPSRC Interdisciplinary Programme on Cellular Regulation (IPCR) which is attracting world-wide interest, and most recently Warwick Systems Biology Centre and the Centre for Fusion Space and Astrophysics. The experience gained from these initiatives together with our current complexity-related research makes UW ideally placed to build a successful Complexity Complex. It brings a timely unity and physical focus to our current activities through its seminars, workshops and joint projects, and will act as a springboard for the development of future projects.