Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 02:51, 5 July 2013

George Sugihara is a theoretical biologist who has worked across a wide variety of fields, including landscape ecology, algebraic topology, algal physiology and paleoecology, neurobiology, atmospheric science, fisheries science, and quantitative finance. He is the inaugural holder of the McQuown Chair in Natural Science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Most of his early work was motivated exclusively by pure science, and the later work more by pragmatic utility and environmental concerns. Nearly all of it is based on extracting information from observational data (turning data into information). His initial work on fisheries as complex, chaotic systems led to work on financial networks and prediction of chaotic systems.

He is one of 18 members of the National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications, and was a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank. He helped found Prediction Company (sold to UBS) and Quantitative Advisors LLC. He has been a consultant to the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and to The Federal Reserve System on questions of international security: systemic risk in the financial sector.

Other notable research relates some of his early work on topology and assembly in ecological systems to recent work on social systems and work on generic early warning signs of critical transitions that apply across many apparently different classes of systems.

Biography

• 1973 B.S. University of Michigan
• 1980 M.S. in biology Princeton
• 1983 Ph.D. in mathematical biology Princeton
• 1983 Wigner Prize Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and concurrently associate professor of Mathematics at the University of Tennessee
• 1986 Joins Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO)
• 1990 UC San Diego John Dove Isaacs Chair at SIO
• 1996 professor of biological oceanography in the Physical Oceanography Research Division at SIO
• 1997-2002 Leave of absence to work in Deutsche Bank on quantitative finance becoming a Managing Director
• 2007 McQuown Chair in Natural Science at SIO

He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, Imperial College London, Kyoto University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He held the John Dove Isaacs Chair in Natural Philosophy from 1990 to 1995, and was a visiting fellow at Merton College, Oxford University, in 2002. He is recipient of several national and international awards, and is currently a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and its Applications, a National Research Council advisory board that advises government agencies and guides the nation’s mathematics agenda to better serve national needs.

Research interests

His research interests include complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics, food web structure, species abundance patterns, conservation biology, biological control, empirical climate modelling, fisheries forecasting, and the design and implementation of derivatives markets for fisheries.

One of his most interdisciplinary contributions involves the work he developed with Robert May concerning methods for forecasting nonlinear and chaotic systems. This took him into the arena of investment banking, where he took a five-year leave from academe to become Managing Director for Deutsche Bank. There he made a successful application of these theoretical methods to forecast erratic market behavior.

Awards and honors

Sugihara is also the recipient of various international awards. Recently he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford and is currently appointed to the National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and its Applications

Selected publications

• 1984. Graph theory, homology and food webs. Proc. Symp. Applied Mathematics, American Mathematical Society: 83-101.
• 1989. Sugihara, G., K. Schoenly and A. Trombla. Scale invariance in food web properties. Science245: 48-52.
• 1990. Nonlinear forecasting as a way of distinguishing chaos from measurement error in time series. Nature: 344:734-741.
• 1993. Fractals: A User's Guide to the Natural Sciences, : OUP, 217p.
• 1995. From out of the blue. Nature: 378:559-560.
• 1999. Episodic fluctuations in larval supply. Science: 283:1528-1530.
• 1999. Residual delay maps unveil global patterns of atmospheric nonlinearity and produce improved local forecasts. PNAS: 96:14,210-14,215.
• 2003. Sugihara, G., L.F. Bersier, S.L. Pimm, T.R. Southwood, and R.M.May. A correspondence between two classical notions of community structure. PNAS 100 (9): 5246-5251.
• 2005. Hsieh CH, Glaser SM, Lucas AJ, Sugihara G (2005a) Distinguishing random environmental fluctuations from ecological catastrophes for the North Pacific Ocean. Nature 435: 336-340.
• 2006. Hsieh CH, CS Reiss, JR Hunter, JR Beddington, RM May, and G. Sugihara, Fishing elevates variability in the abundance of exploited species. Nature 443: 859-862.
• 2006. Southwood, TR, R.M. May, G. Sugihara 2006. Some observations on related ecological exponents. PNAS Vol 103 (18): 6931-6933.
• 2012. Sugihara, G.; et al. "Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems" Science 338, 496-500

Notes and references

1. UC Announcement of McQuown Chair
2. Sugihara, G. and R. M. May, 1990. Nonlinear forecasting as a way of distinguishing chaos from measurement error in time series. Nature 344 734-741.
3. Conservation policy: Fishy futures Nature 437, 473-474
4. Sugihara, G. 2006. Observations on new directions for understanding systemic risk in the financial sector. Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Academy of Science.
5. May, R.M., S.A. Levin, and G. Sugihara. (2008). Complex systems: Ecology for bankers. Nature 451 893-895
6. Sugihara, G., and H. Ye. Cooperative Network Dynamics. Nature 458, 979-980
7. Scheffer M,J Bascompte, WA Brock, V Brovkin, S R Carpenter, V Dakos, H Held, E H van Ness, M Rietkerk, and G Sugihara. (2009). Early-warning signals for critical transitions. Nature 461 53-59
8. Scripps McQuown Chair appointment biodata
9. Biodata at Scripps
10. PNAS Paper PDF
11. Sugihara, George (26 October 2012). "Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems" (PDF). Science. 338: 496–500. doi:10.1126/science.1227079. Retrieved 5 July 2013. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Template:Persondata

• Living people
• Theoretical biologists
• University of Michigan alumni
• Princeton University alumni
• University of California, San Diego faculty
• People from Scarsdale, New York