Biocomplexity Institute furthers life science research

Professor James Glazier is a physicist who stumbled into biology. \n"In ninth-grade biology, I didn't want to cut up a frog so they sent me to 11th-grade physics," he said.\nBut Glazier was reintroduced to biology when he studied soap bubbles and determined that their interactions were similar to those of cell interactions.\nNow, as the head of the Biocomplexity Institute at IU, he does experiments on animals but manages to combine his work with his love for physics. The 2-year-old Biocomplexity Institute is one of the peripheral extensions of IU's drive to improve its work in the life sciences. Its existence and Glazier's decision to come to IU are impacts of the administration devoting more resources and efforts to promote all aspects of life science research.\nGlazier's curriculum vitae reads like a tour de force of some of the most well-known academic institutions in the country: a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has been a professor or visiting professor at universities in Australia, Ireland, France and Japan. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants and fellowships. Glazier could be a researcher at an Ivy League university. Instead, he chose to teach and conduct his research here in Bloomington. \n"(Kumble Subbaswamy, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences,) promised me a substantial number of faculty hires and he gave me a budget that allowed me to forward my own research and research in biocomplexity through the campus," he said.\nTo some degree, Glazier and his researchers have already begun getting national recognition for IU. Biocomplexity professor John Beggs made national news in February when Beggs and senior Clayton Haldeman published a paper stating that avalanches in the brain, which can be explained using mathematical models, may be responsible for memory storage. Beggs said the field of biocomplexity allowed him to look at the functions of neurons as a group rather than individual neurons.\n"You can't nail a memory down to any one brain cell," he said.\nThe creation of the Biocomplexity Institute is also an attempt to help further IU's standing in the life sciences. This is particularly important because IU has a handicap when it comes to getting research funding.\n"If you write a grant for IU, it has to be better than a grant from Harvard because IU does not have the visibility nationally," Glazier said. "We're getting there, and one of the things biocomplexity is going to do is give us recognition nationally."\nAlso as part of its endeavors to make IU a more prominent name in research, the Biocomplexity Institute hosts workshops that bring the top biocomplexity researchers in the country to Bloomington to discuss the field and their research.\n"And I think it's the first time many of them have been in Indiana, let alone at Indiana University," he said. "And I think they go home and say, 'Wow, Indiana is a serious place for research.'"\nThe Institute has also grown by leaps and bounds since its inception. When Glazier came to IU two years ago, there were no researchers doing work specifically oriented to biocomplexity. Because of redirection and new hiring, there are now seven biocomplexity researchers and as many as seven more doing biocomplexity-related research.\nBiocomplexity is an interdisciplinary science that falls outside of the traditional fields associated with life science research, such as biology, medicine and biochemistry, but it has implications that affect many fields. Combining physics with biology, chemistry, health science, informatics and psychology, biocomplexity researchers try to explain organic processes and interactions within an organism or among groups of organisms using mathematical models.\n"It brings people with a more mathematical, formal background together with people with a more experimental, bench-type life sciences background," said Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck, a professor of physics and neural science who does research related to biocomplexity. "And hopefully in that interaction you find new ground, you find new problems and you find new solutions to old problems."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Michael \nZennie at mzennie@indiana.edu.