Plamen Ch. Ivanov

Professor Ivanov, PhD, DSc, is Director of the Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology at Boston University and Director of the International Summer Institute on Network Physiology (ISINP), Lake Como School for Advanced Studies, Italy. He is a Research Professor at the Physics Department, and an affiliate faculty at the Center for Systems Neurosciences, College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University, and at the Department of Neurosurgery, Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

He has introduced innovative ways to analyze and model physiological systems, adapting and developing concepts and methods from modern statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and networks theory. He has investigated the complex dynamics and underlying control mechanisms of a range of physiological systems, including studies on cardiac and respiratory dynamics, sleep-stage transitions, circadian rhythms, locomotion, and brain dynamics, and has uncovered basic laws of physiologic regulation.

Professor Ivanov has pioneered the study of dynamic network interactions of physiological and organ systems. He is the originator and founder of the multidisciplinary field of Network Physiology. His current work focuses on developing methods of data analysis to investigate interactions among diverse organ systems and build a theoretical framework to understand how physiologic states and functions at the organism level emerge out of organ network interactions, and how diverse organ systems coordinate and integrate their functions to produce health or disease. His work lays the foundation of the Human Physiolome, a new type of BigData, containing streams of continuously recorded, high frequency, synchronized physiological signals under various states and clinical conditions, with an associated Atlas of network maps representing interactions among physiological systems at different levels in the human organism.

His discoveries have been broadly featured in the Media, including Scientific American (2004), Science News (1996, 2012), Nature Science Update (2003, 2004), New Scientist (1999, 2002), Physics World (2016), Nature Medicine Research Highlights (2005), Washington Post (2005), Futurity Magazine (2015), The Boston Globe (2015).

Professor Ivanov is the Field Chief Editor of the journal Frontiers in Network Physiology. He is the founding Director of the International Summer Institute on Network Physiology (ISINP), Lake Como School of Advanced Study. Professor Ivanov is one of nine founding members of PhysioNet – the first US National NIH-sponsored data sharing research resource with millions of users and data downloads, and now world leading resource with millions of users and data download annually which facilitated more than 20,000 scientific/clinical studies and publications. He has served as editorial and advisory board member for several leading journals, including New Journal of Physics, EPL (Europhysics Letters), EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics, Journal of Biological Physics (JOBP), Physiological Measurement and Frontiers in Physiology. His research has been funded by NIH, the W.M. Keck Foundation, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF).

For his pioneering applications of statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics to physiology and biomedicine, and for uncovering fundamental scaling and multifractal properties, self-organized criticality, sleep- and circadian-related phase transitions in physiologic dynamics, Professor Ivanov was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. He is recipient of the Sustained Research Excellence Award of the Biomedical Research Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2009-2011); the Georgi Nadjakov Medal of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2012), the Pythagoras (Pitagor) Prize for high achievements in interdisciplinary research bestowed by the President of Bulgaria (2014), and $ 1 milion W.M. Keck Foundation Award (2015).