Professor Stefan Thurner

Stefan Thurner, 2 Ph.D.s is full professor for Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna, where he founded the Complex Systems Research Group (now Section for Science of Complex Systems) in 2003. Since 2007 he is also external professor at the Santa Fe institute.
 
After earning his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the Technical University of Vienna in 1995, he held postdoc research positions at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Boston University before he joined the University of Vienna in 1999 and later Medical University. In 2001 he got a second Ph.D. in economics at the University of Vienna and his Habilitation in theoretical physics. About this time — strongly influenced by visits to the Santa Fe Institute — he began to shift his focus from theoretical physics to biological and complex systems, which are now his main areas of scientific work.
 
Since 1995 Stefan has published more than 120 scientific articles in fundamental physics (topological excitations in quantum field theories, alternative entropy formulations), applied mathematics (wavelet statistics, fractal harmonic analysis, diffusion processes), complex systems (network theory, evolutionary systems), life sciences (heart beat dynamics, gene regulatory networks, cell motility, bioinformatics), econophysics (price formation, banking regulation, systemic risk) and lately in social sciences (opinion formation and bureaucratic inefficiency). He holds 2 patents.
 
Stefan has co-organized several international workshops, conferences and summer schools, and has himself presented more than 150 talks. His work has received broad interest from the media such as the New York Times, BBC world, Nature, New Scientist, Physics World and is featured in more than 100 newspaper, radio, and television reports. He works in a network of scientists mostly around the Santa Fe Institute, the Collegium Budapest, where he was a fellow in 2007, and several European initiatives, such as COST actions, where he serves as the Austrian delegate. He serves as a member of several scientific boards.
 
He coedited Principles of Evolution: From the Planck Epoch to Complex Multicellular Life and coauthored Traffic on complex networks: Towards understanding global statistical properties from microscopic density fluctuations, Analysis, synthesis, and estimation of fractal-rate stochastic point processes, Multiresolution Wavelet Analysis of Heartbeat Intervals Discriminates Healthy Patients from Those with Cardiac Pathology, Information Super-Diffusion on Structured Networks, and Multirelational organization of large-scale social networks in an online world. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Apart from science, he has been active in quantitative financial consulting for financial institutions since 2003 in particular for automated trading strategies. In 1993 he founded a non-professional chamber music group for which he still plays the clarinet.
 
Watch Anatomy of Financial Crisis. Read Mars and Venus Online: How the Genders Differ in Their Use of Social Networks.