Jordi Soriano Fradera is a Spanish physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Barcelona, where he leads the Neurophysics Group and serves as vice-director of the university’s Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He earned his PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona before completing postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Germany and in neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For more than fifteen years, his group has developed in vitro neuronal cultures and biophysical models to study how connectivity and collective dynamics give rise to brain function, and how they break down in neurological disease. He has collaborated closely with medical teams on Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s disease, and coordinated research under the EU Horizon 2020 NEU-CHiP project on biological computing. In this InterDialogue, recorded in Soriano’s lab among live neuronal cultures and imaging equipment, we trace his path from studying fluid fronts in porous media as a condensed matter physicist to a twenty-year career in neurophysics. We discuss how his group engineers rat and human stem-cell-derived neuronal cultures to model the brain’s structural and functional connectivity and to serve as disease models for Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s, the prospects and limits of cell transplantation and personalized medicine, and why Soriano estimates a twenty-year horizon before such approaches reach the clinic. We also discuss his work on network damage, resilience, and criticality in neuronal cultures, the NEU-CHiP project’s attempt to train living neurons to perform computation, neuromorphic chips that mimic neurons in silicon, and a striking experiment in which donated human brain tissue was made to play back a melody fed to it through a robotic piano. We close by considering the ethical stakes of coupling neuronal cultures with robots and augmented-human technologies, Soriano’s efforts to help build neuroscience...

Javier Buldú is a Spanish physicist and complexity scientist whose research spans complex networks, nonlinear dynamics, neuroscience, and sports analytics. He leads the Complex Systems Group at the King Juan Carlos University in Madrid and has held research positions at institutions including the Spanish Astrobiology Center and the University of Oxford. Buldú has also played a prominent role in building the international complex systems community through initiatives such as the Latin American Conference on Complex Networks (LANET), the Interdisciplinary Group of Complex Systems in Madrid, and the Sicómoro Foundation–URJC Chair in Complex Systems. In this InterDialogue, we trace Buldú’s intellectual journey from his early work on chaos, synchronization, and laser-based communication systems to his pioneering contributions to network science. We discuss his research on general complex networks, functional brain networks, Alzheimer’s disease, and the emerging field of “networks of networks,” exploring how competing and cooperating systems can be modeled across scales ranging from neuroscience to economics and international relations. We then turn to Buldú’s influential work applying complexity science to football, examining how advances in data collection, tracking technologies, and artificial intelligence are transforming both sports analytics and network research more broadly. He explains how professional sports provide an unprecedented laboratory for studying collective behavior and spatial networks, and how insights derived from sports data may ultimately inform the study of many other complex systems. We also discuss science communication, the future of complexity science, the development of network science in Latin America, and the opportunities and challenges posed by AI in scientific research. Finally, Buldú reflects on the personal side of scientific life, including his passion for long-distance motorcycle travel and the role it plays in maintaining balance and perspective. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 2:42 – From laser chaos to network science 6:29 – Brain networks, synchronization, and Alzheimer’s...

Investment in science is a pillar for any dynamic, equitable modern society, and promoting scientific literacy across all levels of society can help foster innovation, dialogue, and consensus that crosses disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Science also helps to uncover answers to foundational questions that have captivated, confounded, and divided our species for millennia. But what is “science,” and what kind of “evidence” ensures that an approach is scientific? If we take “science” to broadly mean, in its purest sense, a “dynamic search for the truth,” or more explicitly, “the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence,” as the Science Council aptly defines it, then science extends beyond the established, highly specialized disciplines of reductionist natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geoscience, and space science) that have been so successful in fostering our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. Under this definition, science also includes the rigorous data-driven (qualitative and quantitative) social sciences, the inherently non-reductionist “holistic” sciences such as ecological and Earth system sciences, and the budding interdisciplinary field of complex systems science, as well as robust traditional knowledge systems based on multi-generational experiences, observations, and reasoning. As with science, “evidence” can mean a lot of things as well, including primary research, pre-existing data, past and planned experiments, and the referencing of peer-reviewed publications and primary sources. It can also include local and traditional knowledge, thought experiments, theoretical proofs, contemplation, verifiable personal experience, and empirical observation. Broadening and weaving together these forms of scientific evidence holds the potential to address complex, interconnected global challenges and explain deep mysteries that could help unify our polarized societies around foundational understandings. Foundational Questions Foundational questions can transcend the divides of generations and cultures: Cosmology, physics, and evolutionary biology have shed...

In this InterDialogue, Spanish physicist and complex systems theorist Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes speaks with The InterPlex founder Daniel Henryk Rasolt about a wide range of topics, beginning with a discussion of LANET, the Latin American Conference on Complex Networks, which he helped found. Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes is a Full Professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, where he leads the Group of Theoretical & Applied Modeling (GOTHAM lab) at the BIFI Institute. Professor Gómez-Gardeñes has led a varied and impactful career. His research has explored topics such as collective behavior, nonlinear dynamics, evolutionary dynamics, epidemics, and theoretical biology, all from the standpoint of complex systems and network theory. He is currently organizing the 2026 CompleNet conference, to be held in Zaragoza from May 4 to 8. This dialogue ranges from Gómez-Gardeñes’s experiences as a thought leader in complex network sciences in Europe and Latin America to his work on epidemics, urban mobility, and metapopulation networks. He also touches on confronting anti-science rhetoric and the need for scientists to address misinformation by establishing effective links with the media and policymakers. The discussion concludes with an assessment of the complexity inherent to Colombia, a nation that Gómez-Gardeñes has spent much time working in, and a view toward his current and future projects. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 4:32 – How LANET Was Founded 8:23 – International Academic Exchange between Colombia and Europe 11:28 – The Role of Complex Networks in Interdisciplinary Collaborations 14:19 – Networking and Collaborating Through Conferences 17:17 – Building Local Capacity and Fostering International Collaborations 23:21 – Expanding Reach and Accessibility, Hybrid Courses 26:37 – Gómez-Gardeñes’s Research on Epidemics 32:33 – Metapopulation Networks 36:08 – Pivoting From Urban Mobility Research to Epidemics 41:10 – Mosquitoes as Vectors 47:03 – Socio-Behavioral Factors and Epidemic Forecasting...

Why life is complex and — most importantly — what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, “is screaming to be answered but seldom is even being asked.” In this three-article series, we review recent attempts across several scales to understand the origins of complex biological problems from the perspective of critical phenomena. Following a broad introduction to complexity, criticality and universality in Part 1, to illustrate the approach, three cases will be discussed in Parts 2 and 3; large scale brain dynamics, the characterization of spontaneous fluctuations of proteins, and the physiological complexity of the cell mitochondria network. Introduction In the last decade, we have witnessed an escalating interest in complex biological phenomena at all levels including macroevolution, neuroscience at different scales, and molecular biology. Potential progress is of paramount importance, thus we shall examine a bit how we are currently proceeding to carve out these new areas, starting with asking whether biological phenomena are more or less complex than other fundamental problems in physics. The answer is not clear at first, however striking differences exist in the approaches as well as in the sociology of both fields.  The history of physics records many important efforts in search for universality; large classes of phenomena must be explained in terms of a few fundamental laws. In contrast, biology more often seems to emphasize unique and singular aspects; because not all organisms are alike, there is a large diversity of species, families, etc… such that taxonomy ends up prevailing over integration of knowledge. This apparent uniqueness of each biological phenomena in some cases leads to overspecialization, which may, from time to time, encourage the creation of a sub-discipline for each new group of complex biological...

In this wide-ranging interdialogue, I spoke with Argentinian complex systems scientist Dante Chialvo. Chialvo is a trained biologist who has dedicated much of his career to working in, and collaborating with, physicists, and was at the forefront of a movement that brought many physicists into the biological sciences between the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the early 90’s he was associated with the Sante Fe Institute, and was a full professor at Northwestern University and UCLA, before returning to Argentina as a principal investigator for CONICET, and to lead the Multidisciplinary Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at the National University of San Martin in Buenos Aires.  Chialvo has researched diverse physical phenomena that cross many disciplines, based around scale-free non-linear dynamics, self-organized criticality, phase transitions and collective behavior, such as with cardiac arrhythmias, social insects, microorganisms and the immune system. But it is Chialvo’s wide-ranging work on the brain that he is best known for, and his pioneering work with the late Danish physicist and complex systems scientist Per Bak that explored the brain as a self-organizing critical system, has paved the way for much interdisciplinary research into neural networks and neuroimaging, including work on sleep, memory and psychedelics. Chialvo is also a strong proponent of universality as a guiding principle for scientific research and for uncovering fundamental physical laws, and we spoke about his paper “Life at the Edge,” which addresses the origin of complexity in nature through this lens of universality and fundamental physics.  We also spoke about the growth of complex systems science from a theoretical framework into a mature experimental science over the past decades, and also how the field is growing in different regions, including Latin America. We also discussed the importance of investing in science, and the troubling current circumstances for science, technology...