Support is requested for the biomedical part of the program of the Fifth International Conference on Complex Systems. This event will build on the successes of four previous conferences, the main international conference series dedicated to the unified study of complex dynamical systems. In the upcoming conference, the last day of the conference (consisting of two plenary sessions of four speakers each) will be devoted to systems biology, and two of the other plenary sessions to be on complex systems approaches to biology and medicine. The proposed support would be for the presenters in the biomedical sessions, students and postdocs. This conference will advance NIH's interest in promoting the use of quantitative tools from mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering to enhance the understanding of complex biological systems. The conference will expand the community that can contribute to this objective by informing students from other disciplines about the major questions in biology and about the recent advances that are enabling rapid progress in this area, and by providing biomedical students and researchers with background in the concepts and quantitative methods that can be applied to understanding complex biological systems. The host institution, the New England Complex Systems Institute is an educational and research institution with the participation of faculty from major academic institutions. It is dedicated to interdisciplinary communication and collaboration on the study of complex systems. The growing effort to understand complex systems and complexity has attracted wide-ranging interest in the scientific community. Various conferences and workshops have addressed aspects of the study of complex systems. However, the International Conference on Complex Systems is the only major international conference series to bring the wide diversity of researchers together demonstrating and promoting the interdisciplinary but coherent nature of these efforts.
