Lecturers

Daniela Paolotti

Daniela got her PhD in Physics from the University of Camerino, Italy in 2005. She is Research Leader in the Computational Epidemiology and Public Health group at ISI Foundation in Turin. Before joining ISI in 2008, she was a researcher in the Bioinformatics group at the Novartis Vaccine Research Center in Siena. Her main interest is in digital and computational epidemiology. At ISI she coordinates the Europe-wide network of platforms for Web-based surveillance of influenza called Influenzanet.

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M. Ángeles Serrano

M. Ángeles is an ICREA Research Professor at the Dept. of Condensed Matter Physics of the University of Barcelona (UB). She holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from UB and a master in mathematics for finance from the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica CRM. After four years as IT consultant and mutual fund manager, she returned to academia in 2004 to work in complexity science within the franework of network science. She conducted postdoctoral research at Indiana University (USA), the EPFL (Switzerland), and IFISC Institute (Spain). She came back to Barcelona in 2009, when she was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship at UB. M. Ángeles obtained the Outstanding Referee Award of the American Physical Society and belongs to the Editorial Board of the APS journal Physical Review Research. She is a founding member of Complexitat, the Catalan network for the study of complex systems, and a promoter member of UBICS, the UB Institute of Complex Systems.

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Ricard Solé

Ricard is an ICREA research professor (the Catalan Institute for research and Advanced Studies) currently working at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he is the head of the Complex Systems Lab located at the PRBB. He teaches undergraduate courses on Biomathematics, Biological Design and Complex Diseases. He completed degrees in both Physics and Biology at the University of Barcelona and received his PhD in Physics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. He is also External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute (New Mexico, USA), Fellow of the European centre for Living Technology (Venice, Italy), external faculty at the Center for Evolution and Cancer at UCSF and at the Vienna’s Complex Systems Hub . He is also member of the editorial board of Biology Direct and PLoS ONE. He has received a European Research Council Advanced Grant (ERC 2012) and support from the Fundación Botin. He has also been science advisor of the CCCB exhibit +HUMANS (on the future of our species) and organiser of the Xmas Lectures (Ciencia al Nadal) in Barcelona, also held at the CCCB.

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TITLE

Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems

ABSTRACT

It has been argued that the historical nature of evolution makes it a highly path-dependent process. Under this view, the outcome of evolutionary dynamics could result in a very diverse landscape of complex agents, with very different kinds of forms and functions. At the same time, there is ample evidence that convergence and constraints strongly limit the domain of the potential design principles that evolution can achieve. Are these limitations relevant in shaping the fabric of the possible? Here, we argue that fundamental constraints are associated with the logic of living matter. We illustrate this idea by considering thermodynamic properties of living systems, the linear nature of molecular information, the cellular nature of the building blocks of life, its open-endedness, the threshold nature of computations in cognitive systems, language and the discrete nature of the architecture of ecosystems. In all these examples, we present available evidence and suggest potential avenues towards a well-defined theoretical formulation.

Jacopo Fregoni (Guest lecturer)

Jacopo is Associate Editor at the Communications Physics —a journal of the Nature Portfolio journal— since 2023.
He obtained his PhD in Physics and Nanosciences from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2020, investigating via quantum methods the dynamics of molecules in nanocavities. The main work produced during his PhD was awarded with two prizes by the Italian Chemical Society as young chemist best scientific work of 2020. He then conducted post-doctoral research at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he expanded his theoretical research interests to the modelling of the interaction between complex electromagnetic environments and material structures, and the phenomenology emerging from it. At Communications Physics, Jacopo handles optics and photonics, atomic and molecular physics, and part of the network science submissions.

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