Luís A. Nunes Amaral, PhD

  • HHMI Early Career Scientist
  • Co-Director, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
  • Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering
  • Professor of Physics & Astronomy (courtesy)
  • Professor of Medicine (courtesy)

Professor Amaral, a native of Portugal, conducts and directs research that provides insight into the emergence, evolution, and stability of complex social and biological systems. His research aims to address some of the most pressing challenges facing human societies and the world’s ecosystems, including the mitigation of errors in healthcare settings, the characterization of the conditions fostering innovation and creativity, or the growth limits imposed by sustainability.

Recently, Amaral proposed the development of cartographic methods for the representation of complex biological networks. These methods will enable researchers to to glean the important information on a given system at the scale of interest to the researcher. These tools hold the promise to enable biomedical researcher to design or re-engineer biological systems for therapeutic purposes.

Professor Amaral has published over 150 scientific peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals. Those papers have been cited in excess of 13 thousand times. His research has been featured in numerous media sources, both in the US and abroad. He has received a CAREER award from the National Institutes of Health, was named a Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research by the W. M. Keck Foundation, and has been selected as an Early Career Scientist by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.