Ricard Sole (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, and Santa Fe Institute, USA)
Biography
Ricard Solé is a research professor with ICREA (the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies) and is currently working at Pompeu Fabra University, where he is head of the Complex Systems Lab in the PRBB (Barcelona Biomedical Research Park). He holds 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) and of the Complexity Hub in Viena. His research has been supported by several institutions in Europe and the United States, from the McDonell Foundation to the ERC Advanced Grants. One of his main research interests is understanding the origins and evolution of complexity and of the natural and artificial systems, including the space of possible cognitions of what he calls "liquid brains". In the last few years, he has been driving new research aimed at the "terraforming" of ecosystems in danger of collapse and how to perform small-scale implementations of planetary regulation. He uses both theoretical and experimental approaches based on synthetic biology.
"The multiscale modelling of ecosystems: from the test tube to the biosphere."
Understanding ecological complexity requires necessarily asking for the right questions on the right scales. Biodiversity, extinction, tipping points, resilience or evolution are crucial components of our approach to ecology across spatial and temporal scales. We will discuss the challenges regarding these scales and the existence of emergent phenomena within the context of theoretical models, from microbiomes and synthetic ecosystems to the biosphere.
The relevance of these modelling approaches to conservation biology, future intervention scenarios and planetary regulation in the test tube will be discussed.
