Abstract: Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov, PhD, DSc, is the Director of the Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Research Professor in Physics and Neurosurgery at Boston University. Prof. Ivanov has pioneered the study of dynamic network interactions of physiological and organ systems. He is the originator and founder of the multidisciplinary field of Network Physiology. He has introduced innovative ways to analyze and model physiological systems, adapting and developing concepts and methods from modern statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and network theory. Prof. Ivanov is the field chief editor of Frontiers in Network Physiology and Director of the International Summer Institute on Network Physiology (ISINP), Lake Como School of Advanced Study. He is a founding member of PhysioNet – the first US National NIH-sponsored data and algorithms research resource. For his pioneering applications of statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics to physiology and biomedicine, Prof. Ivanov was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010 and recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including the W. M. Keck foundation national award.

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Bio: The human body functions as an integrated network, with multiple physiological systems interacting at various scales to produce states like wake, sleep, and consciousness. Breakdowns in these interactions can cause dysfunction or organism wide collapse. The field of network physiology, pioneered by Dr. Ivanov, seeks to uncover the nature and collective role of these organ interactions in health and disease by focusing on network coordination, not just individual systems. In this talk, Dr. Ivanov demonstrates how physiologic network topology and systems connectivity lead to integrated global behaviors representative of distinct states and functions. He will also show that universal laws govern physiological networks at different levels of integration in the human body, and the transitions across physiological states are associated with specific modules of hierarchical network reorganization. He will outline the implications for new theoretical developments, basic physiology and clinical medicine, novel platforms of integrated biomedical devices, robotics and cyborg technology. These investigations mark the initial steps toward building the first atlas of dynamic interactions among organ systems and the Human physiolome, a new kind of big data of blueprint reference maps that uniquely represent physiologic states and functions under health and disease.