Name Adilson Motter | ||
 | ||
Institutions Northwestern University Notable awards 2009 Sloan Research Fellow,
2011 NSF CAREER Award,
2013 Erdos-Renyi Prize,
2015 Simons Foundation Fellow,
2015 Fellow of the AAAS Fields Physics, Applied mathematics | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
Adilson E. Motter (Brazil, January 1, 1974), is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, where he has helped develop the concept of synthetic rescue in network biology as well as methods to control the nonlinear dynamics of complex networks. Motter's research is focused on complex systems and nonlinear phenomena, primarily involving complex networks, systems biology, chaos and statistical physics.
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Scientific activity
Motter has contributed to the study of nonlinear phenomena in complex systems. He and his collaborators have established conditions for the synchronization of power grids and other complex networks. Together with his former student Z. Nicolaou, he designed a class of mechanical metamaterials that exhibit longitudinal negative compressibility. He has devised local methods for cascade control in distributed systems. His group has studied implications of these methods for the recovery of lost function in biological and ecological networks and for the control of complex networks in general. In other areas he is known for accommodating the formalism of chaos theory within general relativity and, along with his collaborators, for establishing the three degrees of separation for English words.
Awards
Motter is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow in 2009, received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, and was awarded the Erdös-Rényi Prize in Network Science in 2013. In 2014 he was identified among the 30 most promising scientists under the age of 40 born in Latin America, according to a survey conducted jointly by the magazine Qué Pasa and the blog LatinAmericanScience.org. In 2015, the Simons Foundation named Motter one of their Fellows in Theoretical Physics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).