The Boston College Branch of ICAM

Many key challenges and opportunities in the study of matter involve complex and collective phenomena. These challenges often fall at the boundaries between conventional disciplines, and there is an urgent need to create new approaches capable of exploiting these opportunities.  The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) promotes the study of matter with an emphasis on emergent behavior – phenomena whose ultimate cause involves interactions between many simple units but which cannot be easily predicted from knowledge of the component parts alone. Our shorthand for soft, hard, and living matter exhibiting emergent phenomena is complex adaptive matter.

Through a Physics Department initiative in 1999, Boston College became a founding member of ICAM, which now comprises about 50 institutions worldwide.  ICAM sponsored activities at BC involve science spanning Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Neuroscience and Physics.  Our mission includes

• research that may shed light on the organizing principles characterizing emergent behaviour; 
  
• education of the next generation of scientists through the training of postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students; and
  
• outreach to a broader audience, for instance, through public lectures, programs for high school students, and web-based museum exhibits such as the emergent matter project.
  

The BC branch of ICAM is also strategically positioned to contribute to the development of an Integrative Science Institute at Boston College, both through our local interdisciplinary research and educational activities and through drawing on ICAM's international network of expertise.