ISINP 2019 is the second international event devoted to the new field of Network Physiology with 110 participants from 21 countries.

This summer institute, which we organize July 28 - August 2, 2019, at the Lake Como School for Advanced Studies, Como, Italy, aims to address a diverse audience of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists and faculty across a broad range of disciplines ranging from physics, applied mathematics and biomedical engineering to neuroscience, physiology and clinical medicine, covering a range of physiologic systems from the cellular to the organism level, and will discuss the challenges, current frontiers and future developments in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Network Physiology.

ISINP is supported by: The W. M. Keck Foundation, Alessandro Volta Foundation, Philips Respironics, Physiological Measurement, New Journal of Physics, Moberg Research Inc, EPL, EPS and IPEM.

Click to download: PDFs of the lectures presented at the summer institute on Network Physiology

ISINP 2019, Villa del Grumello, Como, participants Group Photo:

Director and Organizer: Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov

Network Physiology is an emerging field that aims to determine how the various organs and physiologic systems within the human body interact. The human body is an integrated network, in which complex physiological systems continuously communicate to coordinate their functions. This is essential to produce distinct physiologic states, such as wake and sleep, rest and exercise, consciousness and unconsciousness. Disrupting the network of organ interactions can lead to dysfunction of individual systems or breakdown of the entire organism (multiple organ failure).

ISINP 2019 will cover a range of physiologic systems from the cellular to the organism level, and will discuss the challenges, current frontiers and future developments in the interdisciplinary field of Network Physiology. The event will provide a forum for developing new methodologies and theoretical framework to address problems in network physiology; to initiate development of new databases of continuous and synchronous recordings of multiple physiological parameters under health and disease (the Human Physiolome); and to promote data-driven discoveries of the basic physiologic laws and control mechanisms that underlay physiologic interactions. ISINP 2019 will address a diverse audience across disciplines from neuroscience, physiology and clinical medicine, to network science, physics, applied mathematics and biomedical engineering.

This summer institute will take place from 29 July till 03 August, 2019 at the Lake Como School for Advanced Studies, Como, Italy

Deadlines

• Application: 15 April, 2019

• Notification of acceptance: 15 May, 2019

• Registration (only accepted participants): 15 June, 2019

ISINP 2019 is supported by: Alessandro Volta Foundation, The W. M. Keck Foundation, Physiological Measurement.

Dr. Fabrizio Lombardi gave a talk on "Avalanche dynamics and correlations in neural networks", at the Ninth International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS 2018), Cambridge, MA, USA, July 25, 2018.

Prof. Barry C. Barish, LIGO Lab, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, Caltech, and Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics (2017) for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, visited the Keck Laboratory on April 24th, 2018 to discuss and share ideas on Network Physiology.

Dr. Fabrizio Lombardi gave a talk on "Temporal Organization of Neuronal Avalanches at Criticality", at APS March Meeting, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 8 March 2018.

Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov gave a talk on "The New Field of Network Physiology: Mapping the Human Physiolome", on the final program of understanding oscillatory dynamics meeting at Universität Potsdam - Institut für Physik und Astronomie, Potsdam, Germany, February 16, 2018.

Dr. Xiyun Zhang gave a talk on "Mechanism of Explosive Synchronization in Networked Oscillators", at SIAM conference on applications of dynamical systems, Sandy, Utah, USA, 22 May 2017.

ISINP 2017 is the first international event to inaugurate the new field of Network Physiology with 70 participants from 16 countries. In the Media.

This summer institute, which we organize July 24-29, 2017 at the Lake Como School for Advanced Studies, Como, Italy, aims to address a diverse audience of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists and faculty across a broad range of disciplines ranging from physics, applied mathematics and biomedical engineering to neuroscience, physiology and clinical medicine, covering a range of physiologic systems from the cellular to the organism level, and will discuss the challenges, current frontiers and future developments in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Network Physiology.

ISINP is supported by: The W. M. Keck Foundation, Alessandro Volta Foundation, Physiological Measurement, Moberg Research Inc, Guger Technologies, EPL, IOP, EPS and IPEM.

Click to download: PDFs of the lectures presented at the summer institute on Network Physiology

ISINP 2017, Villa del Grumello, Como, participants Group Photo:

The new field of Network Physiology: redefining health and disease through networks of physiological interactions

This was the first focus issue in the literature devoted to Network Physiology and Network Medicine. Including 26 original publications it is one of the largest and most successful focus issues published in NJP (> 40,000 downloads in one year).

Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov gave a plenary talk entitled "Network Physiology: How complex physiologic organ systems dynamically interact", at the international conference of Nonlinear Dynamics of Electronic Systems (NDES-2015, Como, Italy) on Tuesday, September 8th, 2015.

Plamen Ch. Ivanov, a research professor in the Boston University Physics Department, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to develop a theoretical framework and establish quantitatively how organ systems coordinate their functions and integrate as a network.

Ivanov’s group collaborates with intensive care clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, directed by Dr. Ednan Bajwa; sleep physiologists and epidemiologists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, led by Prof. Susan Redline; and scientists from the biomedical engineering division at Partners HealthCare, led by Dr. Julian Goldman.

The investigators plan to develop the first analytical tools to explore quantitatively the way in which organ systems dynamically interact as a network to produce distinct physiological states, both healthy and pathological. This system integrative approach will lay the foundation for an emerging field—network physiology—which will focus on understanding physiological functions and conditions as emergent, global behaviors coming out of dynamic interactions among diverse systems with transient characteristics.

The team’s approach represents a major departure from the conventional model of physiological research, in which linkages are traced vertically from the molecular level to the organ level. Instead, Ivanov and his team will investigate the horizontal integration across organ systems through their output signals. Their work will lead to a novel platform capable of simultaneously recording organ output signals and directly relating them to physiological states and disease conditions. The team plans to develop the first atlas of dynamic interactions of organ systems.

This transformative research program could have considerable impact, as it may determine for the first time fundamental mechanisms that govern organ network interactions and their evolution across physiological states. The program may also lead to next-generation ICU monitoring devices and more comprehensive assessments of drug effects based on novel information derived from networks of organ interactions. In addition, the investigators will build a database of network maps as a reference for normal and dysfunctional physiological conditions.

This program is a significant step in Boston University’s larger, multidisciplinary initiative to strengthen ties between the natural, computational, biological, and medical sciences.

The W. M. Keck Foundation funds research that is distinctive and novel, with the potential to create new paradigms, technologies, and discoveries that will save lives, provide innovative solutions, and add to our understanding of the world.

Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov organized and chaired the international conference on Nonlinear Dynamics in Electronic and Biologic Systems (NDES), Albena, Bulgaria, 4 - 6 July, 2014.

The workshop is scheduled to start at 1:30p.m. and finish at 6 p.m. on July 5th, 2014.

Organizers:

Prof. Antonio Scala - London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Institute for Complex Systems at CNR, Italy

Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov - Boston University, Harvard Medical School and Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

VISION

Plants are able of amazing sensing capabilities. They sense the environment and when subject to suitable stimuli they generate electrical signals. The PLEASED project is developing a technology to collect and analyse such signals, to use plants as the next generation organic sensing devices. In this perspective, PLEASED technology is not simply inspired by plants, it is an attempt to develop a "Plant Cyborg".

OBJECTIVES

* The first open dataset collecting the electrical signals generated by plants in reaction to specific stimuli (the PLEASED kit)

* The design of classifiers capable to recognize and classify the signals generated by single plants or groups of plants

* A testbed dataset to verify the performance of classification algorithms on plants

Project PLEASED is introducing new standards in the acquisition of electro-physiological signals from plants and is building a massive database of experiments relating plants responses to a wide variety of stimuli. Since the very beginning of the project, it has been clear that a huge amount of work must be done in refining both the deterministic models of plant response (often inspired to the classical neuronal transmission models) and in finding new tools to analyze the statistics and the spectra of plant signals.

By confronting our experience to the knowledge accumulated in the analysis of electro-physiological signals in living being, we intend to build up a community of scientists interested in exploring this exciting field of signals in plants that promises new insights in what we should consider a communicating, intelligent, social living being.

During the workshop, we will have a short demo and introduction to our plant database that will allow people to start working with plant signals. Moreover, we will have a short demo and intro to the signal-taking techniques in plants.

Professor Plamen Ch. Ivanov, a native of Sofia, Bulgaria, has received the prestigious Pitagor (Pythagoras) Prize.

The Pitagor Prize is the highest award in Bulgaria for scientific achievements. The award is given annually by the Bulgarian government to honor scientists in the fields of natural sciences, medicine and technology.

The 2014 Pitagor Prize was given in recognition of Dr. Ivanov's seminal contributions to interdisciplinary science at the interface of physics physiology and medicine, for uncovering basic laws of dynamical interactions among physiological systems, and for pioneering a new field, Network Physiology.

The 2014 Pitagor science awards ceremony was hosted by the Ministry of Education and Science of Bulgaria, and was attended by government officials and representatives of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, leading universities and institutions.

Prof. Plamen Ch. Ivanov becomes the Associate Editor of the New Journal of Physics focus issue on Network Physiology and Network Medicine.

The scope of the issue encompasses both network physiology and network medicine, where new concepts and approaches derived from recent advances in the theory of Complex Networks are applied to provide insights into physiological structure and function in health and disease; from the genetic and sub-cellular level to inter-cellular interactions and communications across integrated organ systems. Of particular interest will be new and little-explored areas of network science including the following.

• Studies on structural and dynamical aspects of physiological systems that transcend time and space scales.

• Networks comprised of diverse dynamical systems.

• The role of time-dependent network interactions for emergent transitions in network topology and function.

• Structure-function dependence.

• Manipulation, control and global dynamics of networks.

• Information flow on network topology.

• Cascades of failure across systems.

• Networks of physiological networks.

Figure. The human organism is an integrated network where complex physiologic systems, each with their own regulatory mechanisms, continuously interact, and where the failure of one system can trigger a breakdown of the entire network. A new field, network physiology, is needed to probe the network of interactions among diverse physiological systems.

(Image copyright: Iris W Bartisch.)

Dr. Ronny Bartsch, received the "Young Investigator of the Year Prize" from the German Society for Sleep Medicine (DGSM) for 2012. Dr. Bartsch received this award in recognition of his work on physiologic coupling during sleep and its relation to sleep disorders and other cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The award is given annually to an investigator under age 35 who conducts outstanding research in the field of sleep medicine, and it includes an invitation to deliver lectures and a €1,500 prize.

This award follows an earlier competitive funding award from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and several publications, including work published in the journals Nature Communications and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS).

The DGSM is an interdisciplinary society with members including physicians specialized in pneumology, internal medicine, neurology, psychiatry, ENT-medicine and pediatrics, as well as researchers working in the fields of physiology, psychology, biology and other natural sciences. The DGSM is devoted to research on sleep regulation and sleep disorders, as well as the development of clinical diagnosis and therapy of sleep-wake disorders.

Highlights in Brigham and Women's Hospital News