The Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science welcomes the renowned expert Prof. Péter Érdi and invites you to join us for the next event of the BCSSS Lecture Series 2016 in Systems Medicine and Healthcare Systems on Thursday, 22 September 2016, 6 pm at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science.
This lecture is a joint event with the Research Platform Cognitive Science of the University of Vienna (CogSci) and the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) of the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies (OSGK).
The talk by Prof. Péter Érdi will present a bird's eye perspective on Dynamical System's Theory to the brain, Computational Neurology, Psychiatry and Neuropharmacology and finally Network-theoretical approach to the brain.
If you are interested to join the lecture, please send a message to felix.tretter@bcsss.org
Péter Érdi
Kalamazoo College, Michigan, USA
Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, HUN
Complex Systems Perspective in Neuroscience - historical and current approaches
About the speaker
Prof. Péter Érdi serves as the Henry Luce Professor (LUCE) at the Center for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, and also keeps his position in Budapest as head of the Theoretical Neuroscience and Complex Systems Group at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics (WIGNER), one of the research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). Additionally he is the founding Co-Director of BSCS – Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science study abroad program. Érdi is a very well known Computational Neuroscientist with a background in Chemical Cybernetics.He started his work in Neuroscience under the supervision of the famous Hungarian Neuroanatomist János Szentágothai. He wrote several books and (co-)published a variety of scholarly articles in the fields of Chemical Kinetics, Computational Neuroscience and Complex Systems. In addition he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Cognitive Systems Research.
About Systems Medicine at the BCSSS
Maintenance of health and the development of diseases are the result of complex dynamic interactions. Systems Medicine is the application of systems biology approaches to medical research and medical practice. Its objective is to integrate a variety of biological/medical data at all relevant levels of organization using the power of computational and mathematical modelling, from the level of inter- and intracellular molecular networks of the cell to the levels of the interdependence of humans and their environments.
As many side-effects of medications are caused by the linkage of different organ systems such as heart and lung, the immune system, endocrine system and nervous system, a new approach in medicine is necessary. These connections are statistically known as co-morbidity.
The first step towards systems medicine intended a better understanding of functions and dysfunctions of the organism by using computer simulations of cell and tissue processes. The connections can now be interpreted by such models that are based on data from inter- and intracellular molecular networks (cytokines, neurotransmitters, etc.).
At present, also clinical systems medicine is constituted that focusses on the interaction of organismic subsystems. Some protagonists call this the 4P medicine, for personalized (individual genome analysis), predictive, preventive and participative medicine (L. Hood, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle) to develop innovative therapies and tailored preventive treatments.
The future outlook is a scenario in which the health care system itself might change based on these findings. A complementary research focus of the Bertalanffy Center in Service Systems Design for large scale, multi-stakeholder complex social systems like health care might be the next promising step.