Welcome to the Complex Systems Group!

The Complex Systems group at UCSB, headed by Physics professor Jean Carlson, investigates robustness, tradeoffs, and feedback in complex, highly connected systems, and develops multi-scale models to capture important small-scale details and predict large-scale behavior.

Research Interests

Students, postdocs, and faculty are actively working on several topics, including:

  • Disaster response
  • Theoretical immunology
  • Dynamic earthquake ruptures
  • Neuroscience
  • Finance
  • Constitutive models for friction
  • Deformation in granular and amorphous solids
  • Highly Optimized Tolerance(HOT)
  • Ecology/Forest fires