Collective behavior and other forms of cooperation are multi-layered phenomena and are subject to complex conditions. In highly dynamic situations, such as pandemics or societal and political developments, they undergo change. Describing the complexity of collective behavior requires synergies between different research disciplines.

Prof. Dirk Brockmann, founding director of the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys), develops methods to investigate phenomena at the interface between biomedicine, social sciences and life sciences.

In his university-wide inaugural lecture “Doing Science Like a Fungus – Complexity Research in the 21^st Century”, Brockmann will discuss how cross-disciplinary perspectives and the combination of social sciences and natural sciences can help us understand the underlying rules in large-scale events. He will give his lecture on February 6, 2025, 4:40-6 pm.

TUD's Rector Prof. Ursula Staudinger will open the event, followed by speeches from Prof. Wolfgang E. Nagel (Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences, CIDS) and Prof. Thorsten Mascher (Dean of the Faculty of Biology).

Dirk Brockmann:
Dirk Brockmann has been Director of the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at the CIDS, TU Dresden, and Chair of Biology of Complex Systems in the Departments of Biology and Physics there since October 2023. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he received his PhD in theoretical physics. In 2024, he was appointed to the German government's Health and Resilience council of experts, the successor to the COVID-19 Expert Council.

Dirk Brockman pioneered the analysis of mass data obtained in natural experiments as well as the understanding of human behavior based on data collected by digital devices. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he launched the German Data Donation Project, in which more than 500,000 donors provided data collected on their smart watches and wearable devices on a daily basis for more than 2.5 years, the largest dataset of this kind in public hands worldwide.

In 2017, Dirk Brockmann launched the Complexity Explorables (http://www.complexity-explorables.org), a collection of web-based interactive models of famous and less famous complex systems to illustrate the beauty of complex dynamical phenomena and teach young students about these systems.

SynoSys:
The Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) is dedicated to developing large-scale computational models of disease dynamics. The focus is on integrating network-theoretical methods and data-driven modeling to describe and predict disease dynamics over wide geographic areas. SynoSys is at the forefront of the new field of digital epidemiology, the analysis of very large data sets of human behavior, including large-scale, highly detailed contact networks, detailed mass mobility data, and very large data sets of mobile device-based physiological data. The scientific focus of SynoSys is on complex networks and their applications in the social sciences as well as in the collective behavior of humans and animal populations. The research team combines methods from computer science, network science and data analysis with applications at the interface of natural sciences, social sciences, and medical sciences.

Website: https://tu-dresden.de/exzellenz/uwil

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