In a quest to become internationally competitive in the theoretical sciences, the fledgling Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, is breaking with European traditions in the structural, teaching, and funding schemes it adopts.
“We have a strong group in neuro-science,” says Wolf Singer, a director at the nearby Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and, with nuclear physics theorist Walter Greiner, a founding director of FIAS. Singer ticks off areas of inquiry at the new institute: polymers, the immune system, neural networks, hadron physics, heavy-ion cancer therapy, left-handed chirality of biologically relevant molecules. “These are all multicomponent systems that self-organize to ordered states, generate patterns, and encode information,” he says. “That’s what ties them together. It’s essentially nonlinear dynamics.”
“Our fellows are very strongly urged to collaborate across disciplines,” says Horst Stöcker, an astroparticle physicist at FIAS. So far, he says, “I am really impressed by the...
