Yaneer Bar-Yam

Last updated
Yaneer Bar-Yam
Yaneer Bar-Yam preparing for his talk on Day 2 of Wikimania 2014.jpg
Bar-Yam (on the left) at Wikimania 2014
Born1959 (age 64–65)
Boston, Massachusetts
Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, PhD)
Scientific career
Fields Complex systems (Application to social, biological and physical systems)
Institutions New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) (1997-today)
Boston University (1991-1997)
Thesis Microscopic Theory of the Dynamics of Defects in Semiconductors.  (1984)
Doctoral advisor John Dimitris Joannopoulos
Doctoral students Erik Rauch
Website necsi.edu/faculty/bar-yam.html

Yaneer Bar-Yam (born 1959) is an American scientist and activist specializing in complex systems. An expert in the quantitative analysis of pandemics, he advised policy makers on the Western African Ebola virus epidemic [1] and founded EndCoronavirus.org, a global network of several volunteers formed in February 2020 to provide information, guidelines, and policy advocacy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. [2] He is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), an independent research institution that studies complex systems science and its real-world applications.

Contents

Biography

Yaneer Bar-Yam was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1959 to Israeli parents. His father, Zvi Bar-Yam, is a high-energy particle physicist, and his mother, Miriam Bar-Yam, is a developmental psychologist. He received his BS degree in 1978 and his Ph.D. degree in 1984, both in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Bantrell Postdoctoral Fellow, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at MIT and IBM. In 1991, following a junior faculty appointment at the Weizmann Institute of Science, he was appointed an Associate Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He left Boston University in 1997 to become the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, a position he holds as of May 2020.

Bar-Yam was a visiting scholar at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He was chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems, an annual forum dedicated to bridging the domains of complexity science and real-world systems, and is the managing editor of InterJournal, a NECSI publication on selected topics in science and engineering.

Bar-Yam is currently a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and is the managing editor of the Springer book series on complexity. [3] [4] [5] [6]

Ideas and Theories

The NECSI website defined "complex systems" as systems that "have multiple interacting components whose collective behavior cannot be simply inferred from the behavior of components." Bar-Yam is considered a contributor to the founding of the field of complex systems science, having introduced fundamental rigor, real-world applications, and educational programs to the field.

Bar-Yam studies the unified properties of complex systems as a systematic strategy for answering basic questions about the world. His research is focused both on formalizing complex systems concepts and relating them to everyday problems. In particular, he studies the relationship between observations at different scales, formal properties of descriptions of systems, the relationship of structure and function, the representation of information as a physical quantity, and quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to physical, biological, and social systems. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

His recent work analyzes the origins and impacts of market crashes, social unrest, ethnic violence, military conflict and pandemics, the structure and dynamics of social networks, and the bases of creativity, panic, evolution, and altruism. [3] Bar-Yam has made further contributions to the theory of the structural and electronic dynamics of materials, the theory of polymer dynamics and protein folding, the theory of neural networks and structure-function relationships, the theory of quantitative multiscale complexity, and the theory of evolution. His development of multiscale representations as a generalization of renormalization group addressed the limitations of calculus and statistics in the study of nonlinear and network system dependencies on collective behaviors. [3]

Work

NECSI

Bar-Yam is the president of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based NECSI, an independent research institution and think tank dedicated to the study of complex systems and its applications to solving real-world problems. NECSI was established by faculty members of various New England academic institutions, including MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, and others, to encourage collaboration among researchers. In addition to its in-house research team, NECSI has co-faculty, students, and affiliates from universities around the world. NECSI also conducts classes, seminars, and conferences to assist students, faculty, and professionals in their understanding of complex systems. NECSI's faculty, co-faculty, and affiliates represent a wide range of scientific disciplines, and have included Jerome Kagan, Thomas Schelling, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. NECSI researchers have contributed to such varied areas as networks, social systems, food crises, and economic systems. [8]

In February 2020, NECSI and Bar-Yam established EndCoronavirus.org to offer information, guidelines, and policy advocacy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consulting and advisory

Bar-Yam has advised many policymaking and regulatory bodies on various topics, including: the Pentagon's Chairman Action Group on global social unrest and the crises in Egypt and Syria; the National Security Council and the National Counter Terrorism Council on global strategy; the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group on military force transformation; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on delivery of prevention services and control of hospital infections; Congressman Barney Frank (as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee) on market regulation and the financial crisis. He has given 175 invited presentations, and has taught the concepts and methods of complex systems science to over 2,000 graduate students, professionals, and executives. [3]

Pandemics Research and Activism

Overview

Pandemics are a natural field of study for complex systems scientists, as many of the main insights of the discipline—including network theory, nonlinearity, chaos, emergent properties, adaptation, and non-ergodicity—can be directly brought to bear on the analysis of infectious diseases and their spread.

Bar-Yam has studied pandemics since the early 2000s, in concert with NECSI's stated mission to foster collaboration among different disciplines (e.g. mathematics and epidemiology) and to apply theoretical work to problems in the real world. His research has emphasized the role of increasing global travel in pandemics; community monitoring of symptoms as potentially superior to conventional testing, tracking, and tracing techniques; and specific guidelines for individuals, policymakers, healthcare workers, and businesses to slow the spread of infectious diseases. [9]

Bar-Yam's early research on pandemics identified the fatality rate of an infectious disease as a key limiting factor in its ability to spread. For the deadliest diseases, he argued that the pathogen would rapidly exhaust the local supply of hosts to infect, and would therefore disappear before it could spread beyond the initial local area of outbreak. [10]

In a 2006 paper co-authored with Erik Rauch, Bar-Yam introduced global travel (e.g. international long-distance flights and overseas shipment of livestock) as a new variable to his earlier pandemic models, which yielded a nonlinear relationship between the amount of global travel and the ultimate severity of an outbreak. Specifically, the authors found that up to a certain point, increasing global travel had little impact on the overall severity of an outbreak. However, when the amount of travel approached a critical threshold, the ultimate severity of the outbreak (and its likelihood of becoming a global pandemic) increased suddenly and sharply. [11] "Due to increasing global travel," Bar-Yam and Rauch wrote in the 2006 paper, "human beings may cross the transition into the realm of pandemics unless preventive actions are taken that either limit global transportation or its impact." [12]

Ebola

During the Western African Ebola virus epidemic which began in 2013, Bar-Yam advocated in favor of curtailing transportation from West Africa, arguing that even in cases where significant interconnectivity between populations already existed, even a small amount of additional interconnectivity could dramatically increase the severity of an outbreak. [10]

Bar-Yam also advocated in favor of community monitoring to fight the Ebola epidemic. The conventional response to infectious disease outbreaks emphasizes individual contact tracing, i.e. the effort to locate all individuals who were in contact with an individual known to carry the disease. Bar-Yam argued that it would be more effective and efficient to monitor local communities (defined as a natural population unit to and from which transportation can be logically curtailed) [11] as a whole—in other words, to treat an entire community as "infected" once one individual in that community is infected, and then intensively screen that community for additional cases while instituting local transportation restrictions. This type of community response would progressively limit the disease to smaller geographical areas, Bar-Yam argued, while improving the allocation of resources. [13] [14] Bar-Yam argued that community monitoring played a significant role in halting the Ebola epidemic in Liberia. [13] [15]

COVID-19

On January 26, 2020, one week after the first case of COVID-19 disease in the United States was reported, Bar-Yam co-authored a note with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Joseph Norman. The note outlined several principles in connection with the novel coronavirus outbreak, and argued that policy responses should follow a precautionary approach, including drastically constraining human mobility patterns as soon and as swiftly as possible. [16]

On February 29, 2020, Bar-Yam and NECSI established EndCoronavirus.org, a global volunteer network, to provide information and guidelines for action to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. EndCoronavirus.org was among the first organizations in the United States to offer specific guidelines for policymakers, businesses, and individuals. As of May 2020, EndCoronavirus.org had over 4,000 volunteers. [17]

On March 13, 2020, the "Coronavirus Guidelines for Businesses" written by EndCoronavirus.org were adopted by the International Chamber of Commerce, the global business organization representing over 45 million members in over 100 countries. [18]

On March 21, 2020, USA Today published an opinion piece by Bar-Yam, in which he argued for an immediate five-week lockdown in the entire United States to defeat COVID-19. [19]

On April 5, 2020, Bar-Yam and Chen Shen published a paper titled "COVID-19: How to Win," which summarized his recommendations. Those recommendations included a lockdown, separate quarantine facilities for mild and moderate COVID-19 cases to prevent transmission within households, mask wearing in shared spaces, travel restrictions, improved safety of essential services, increased testing, health guidelines to prevent mild cases from becoming severe, and increased support for hospitals and healthcare workers. [20]

On April 15, 2020, Bar-Yam reported via Twitter that he was assisting the government of Kosovo in its efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. [21]

On April 28, 2020, Bar-Yam was consulted by Virginia residents on an open letter to Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, calling for more aggressive action to fight COVID-19 in that state. [22] The letter was signed by 430 scientists, doctors, and citizens as of May 25, 2020.

On May 12, 2020, CNN.com published an opinion piece by Bar-Yam, in which he argued against the premature opening of states, and urged individual citizens to continue strict restrictions on their movement and contact with others. [2]

On November 26, 2021, Bar-Yam suggested solely on the basis of a simple linear extrapolation that the omicron variant might have eight times the fatality rate of the wild-type virus. [23]

Publications

Bar-Yam is the author and/or editor of several books, as well as the author of more than 200 research papers in professional journals, including in Science, Nature, PNAS, American Naturalist, and Physical Review Letters. [24] [25] He has published on a range of scientific and real-world problems, including cell biology and the global financial crisis, and is the holder of four patents.

Books

Selected papers

Theses

Patents

Honors

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</span> United States government public health agency

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

The New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) is an independent American research institution and think tank dedicated to advancing analytics and its application to the challenges of society, and the interaction of complex systems with the environment. NECSI offers educational programs, conducts research, and hosts the International Conference on Complex Systems. It was founded in 1996 and is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Globalization, the flow of information, goods, capital, and people across political and geographic boundaries, allows infectious diseases to rapidly spread around the world, while also allowing the alleviation of factors such as hunger and poverty, which are key determinants of global health. The spread of diseases across wide geographic scales has increased through history. Early diseases that spread from Asia to Europe were bubonic plague, influenza of various types, and similar infectious diseases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alessandro Vespignani</span> Italian-American physicist (born 1965)

Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the mathematical modeling of infectious disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the Internet. He is currently the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Network Science Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social distancing</span> Infection control technique by keeping a distance from each other

In public health, social distancing, also called physical distancing, is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other. It usually involves keeping a certain distance from others and avoiding gathering together in large groups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public health emergency of international concern</span> Formal declaration by the World Health Organization

A public health emergency of international concern is a formal declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) of "an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response", formulated when a situation arises that is "serious, sudden, unusual, or unexpected", which "carries implications for public health beyond the affected state's national border" and "may require immediate international action". Under the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), states have a legal duty to respond promptly to a PHEIC. The declaration is publicized by an IHR Emergency Committee (EC) of international experts, which was developed following the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neil Ferguson (epidemiologist)</span> British epidemiologist and researcher

Neil Morris Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Jameel Institute, and of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, and head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Syra Madad</span> American pathogen preparedness expert

Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael J. Ryan (doctor)</span> Irish doctor and Chief Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme

Michael Joseph Ryan is an Irish epidemiologist and former trauma surgeon, specialising in infectious disease and public health. He is executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, leading the team responsible for the international containment and treatment of COVID-19. Ryan has held leadership positions and has worked on various outbreak response teams in the field to eradicate the spread of diseases including bacillary dysentery, cholera, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, measles, meningitis, relapsing fever, Rift Valley fever, SARS, and Shigellosis.

Trudie Lang is a Professor of Global Health Research at the University of Oxford. She specialises in clinical trials research capacity building in low-resource setting, and helped to organise the trial for the drug brincidofovir during the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nahid Bhadelia</span> Indian-American infectious diseases physician and researcher

Nahid Bhadelia is an American infectious-diseases physician, founding director of Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research (CEID) at Boston University and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caitlin Rivers</span> American epidemiologist

Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.

Maimuna (Maia) Majumder is a computational epidemiologist and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital's Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP). She is currently working on modeling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alexandra Louise Phelan is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She specializes in international legal and policy issues that are related to emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, including upstream drivers of disease emergence like climate change.

Planning and preparing for pandemics has happened in countries and international organizations. The World Health Organization writes recommendations and guidelines, though there is no sustained mechanism to review countries' preparedness for epidemics and their rapid response abilities. National action depends on national governments. In 2005–2006, before the 2009 swine flu pandemic and during the decade following it, the governments in the United States, France, UK, and others managed strategic health equipment stocks, but they often reduced stocks after the 2009 pandemic in order to reduce costs.

Helen Branswell is a Canadian infectious diseases and global health reporter at Stat News. Branswell spent fifteen years as a medical reporter at The Canadian Press, where she led coverage of the Ebola, Zika, SARS and swine flu pandemics. She joined Stat News at its founding 2015, leading the website's coverage of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Daszak</span> British zoologist

Peter Daszak is a British zoologist, consultant and public expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention. He is also a member of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He lives in Suffern, New York.

Natalie E. Dean is an American biostatistician specializing in infectious disease epidemiology. Dean is currently an assistant professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. Her research involves epidemiological modeling of outbreaks, including Ebola, Zika and COVID-19.

Science diplomacy is the collaborative efforts by local and global entities to solve global issues using science and technology as a base. In science diplomacy, collaboration takes place to advance science but science can also be used to facilitate diplomatic relations. This allows even conflicting nations to come together through science to find solutions to global issues. Global organizations, researchers, public health officials, countries, government officials, and clinicians have previously worked together to create effective measures of infection control and subsequent treatment. They continue to do so through sharing of resources, research data, ideas, and by putting into effect laws and regulations that can further advance scientific research. Without the collaborative efforts of such entities, the world would not have the vaccines and treatments we now possess for diseases that were once considered deadly such as tuberculosis, tetanus, polio, influenza, etc. Historically, science diplomacy has proved successful in diseases such as SARS, Ebola, Zika and continues to be relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic today.

Sylvie Champaloux Briand is a French physician who is Director of the Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department at the World Health Organization. Briand led the Global Influenza Programme during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Briand launched the WHO Information Network for Epidemics which looked to counter the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.

References

  1. ↑ "How Community Response Stopped Ebola". New England Complex Systems Institute. Archived from the original on 2023-05-27. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  2. 1 2 Bar-Yam, Opinion by Yaneer (12 May 2020). "Don't let governors fool you about reopening". CNN. Archived from the original on 2023-06-06. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Yaneer Bar-Yam". New England Complex Systems Institute. Archived from the original on 2024-07-30. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  4. 1 2 Archived 2013-09-19 at the Wayback Machine Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation website, 2012.
  5. 1 2 Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine UMass Dartmouth, Kaput Center website, 2012.
  6. 1 2 Archived 2024-07-30 at the Wayback Machine Rotman, "Bar-Yam: Balancing Scale with Complexity", Forbes India, Sept 16, 2010.
  7. ↑ Archived 2014-12-22 at the Wayback Machine "Complexity, Democracy, and Sustainability", Programs and Abstracts, The 50th Anniversary Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Sonoma State University, 2006.
  8. ↑ "About". New England Complex Systems Institute. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  9. ↑ "Ending Pandemics". New England Complex Systems Institute. Archived from the original on 2020-05-27. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  10. 1 2 Hartnett, Kevin (10 October 2014). "As Ebola rages, the case for prohibiting travel from West Africa". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on 2020-06-09. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  11. 1 2 "Science Fights the Coronavirus". Harvard Business Review. 2020-03-24. ISSN   0017-8012. Archived from the original on 2024-07-30. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  12. ↑ "Long-Range Interaction and Evolutionary Stability in a Predator-Prey System". New England Complex Systems Institute. Archived from the original on 2024-07-30. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  13. 1 2 "Did Authorities Use the Wrong Approach to Stop Ebola?". Time. Archived from the original on 2024-07-30. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  14. ↑ Wong, Vincent; Cooney, Daniel; Bar-Yam, Yaneer (2016-03-08). "Beyond Contact Tracing: Community-Based Early Detection for Ebola Response". PLOS Currents. 8. arXiv: 1505.07020 . doi: 10.1371/currents.outbreaks.322427f4c3cc2b9c1a5b3395e7d20894 . PMC   4946441 . PMID   27486552.
  15. ↑ "Is The Response in Liberia Succeeding?". New England Complex Systems Institute. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  16. ↑ "Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens – Coronavirus: A Note". New England Complex Systems Institute. Archived from the original on 2020-05-27. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  17. ↑ "EndCoronavirus.org". EndCoronavirus.org. Archived from the original on 2020-05-28. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  18. ↑ "ICC/NECSI publish business guidance to tackle COVID-19". ICC - International Chamber of Commerce. 2020-03-13. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  19. ↑ Bar-Yam, Yaneer. "We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America". USA TODAY. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  20. ↑ "COVID-19: How to Win". New England Complex Systems Institute. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  21. ↑ Bar-Yam, Yaneer [@yaneerbaryam] (April 15, 2020). "Kosovo is taking action at the municipal level to appropriately "overreact," to stop the outbreak, and to return to normal quickly, as we have recommended. Bravo! They are leading! I am honored to help. https://msh.rks-gov.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Vendim.pdf …" (Tweet). Retrieved 2020-05-29– via Twitter.
  22. ↑ Antonio-Vila, Lydia (30 April 2020). "An open letter to Governor Northam calls for stronger restrictions". Fairfax County Times. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  23. ↑ Bar-Yam, Yaneer [@yaneerbaryam] (November 26, 2021). "Very rough estimate of Nu variant mortality is 8X original variant based upon the current rough estimate of transmissibility, assuming they track each other.
    Corrections welcome.
    (Figure type labeled Nu)"     (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  24. ↑ "Yaneer Bar-Yam". New England Complex Systems Institute . Archived from the original on 2011-02-07. Retrieved 2011-02-07.
  25. ↑ "Books". New England Complex Systems Institute . Archived from the original on 2016-02-27. Retrieved 2016-01-29.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.