Science

Many moons ago, when I was the grand old age of about eight, a school friend told me that I was going to be a scientist. I protested loudly at the time. And now I find myself... Hmm. Interesting.

Here is the history, post-school: I (me; Joseph Wakeling) studied maths first of all, at Imperial College, London, where I obtained an MSci degree and an Associateship of the Royal College of Science. Then in my final year I completely changed my mind about what I wanted to work on and started getting interested in the brain and neural systems, and more generally in the physics of complex systems and something called self-organized criticality. Courtesy of all these interests I wound up at the University of Fribourg studying for a PhD in theoretical physics as part of the econophysics research group there, and have since worked in a variety of different countries and institutes from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen to NIMH in the United States and the psychology department of the University of Warsaw.

If this all sounds a pretty wide range of stuff to be taking in — well, you are right! But this, I think, is one of the most exciting things about modern science: the old boundaries between disciplines are coming down and it is now common to find biologists, physicists, economists and others all working together on different problems of common interest. These pages delve into some of these problems, covering both my own work and that of others which I think is worth investigating. I hope you find it interesting too!