Bio

Adilson E. Motter is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics and Astronomy and (by courtesy) Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University. Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty in March 2006, he held positions as Guest Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Germany, and as Director's Funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2002 from UNICAMP, Brazil, where he worked with Professor Patricio S. Letelier. Recent awards received by Professor Motter include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Weinberg Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research, the Northwestern-Argonne Early Career Investigator Award for Energy Research, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the Erdös-Rényi Prize in Network Science, and a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. He has been featured among the 30 promising scientists under the age of 40 born in Latin America identified by the Chilean magazine Qué Pasa and the international organization LatinAmericanScience.org, and selected Outstanding Referee of the APS. Professor Motter is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the Network Science (NetSci) Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Professor Motter’s research is focused on the network modeling of complex physical, biological, and engineered systems. His research group uses a combination of tools from statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and data science and benefits from close collaborations with experimentalists and researchers from other disciplines. Research topics pursued in the group include cascading dynamics, spontaneous synchronization, network control, and symmetry phenomena; quantum networks, machine learning applied to network problems, and data-driven discovery in network science; applications to quantitative biology and biomedical research, renewable energy and smart power grids, and microfluidics and metamaterials.

This research is inherently interdisciplinary and has been facilitated by Professor Motter's affiliations with various programs in addition to his home Department of Physics and Astronomy. His current affiliations include the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute (CLP), Molecular Biophysics Program, Physical Sciences-Oncology Center (PSOC), Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN), Graduate Program in Applied Physics, Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).

Professor Motter has served as Editorial Board Member of Physical Review X (APS), the Journal of Nonlinear Science (Springer), Nonlinearity (IOP), Advanced Science (Wiley-VCH), and Chaos, Solitons & Fractals (Elsevier); as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (IEEE) and the Journal of Complex Networks (Oxford University Press); and as Editor of Chaos (AIP). He has also served as a member of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute, as Executive Committee Member and Advisory Committee Member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, as Executive Committee Member of the Northwestern Department of Physics and Astronomy, as Co-Chair of the NSF Workshop and Report on Multidisciplinary Complex Systems Research, and as Chair of the Awards Committee of the Network Science Society. He has served as Chair of the APS Topical Group on Statistical & Nonlinear Physics (GSNP) and Vice President and Secretary of the Network Science Society. He is currently the Director of the Integrated Science Program at Northwestern University, Faculty Advisor of the Northwestern's SIAM Student Chapter, and President of the Network Science Society.