In the summer of 1996, David Pines and Zachary Fisk were discussing over lunch in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) cafeteria the fact that many different groups and divisions at LANL were studying emergent behavior in matter, yet they were not communicating or collaborating with each other. Indeed, given their continuing competition for funding, the whole of the enterprise was definitely less than the sum of its parts. How could they be brought to see they were studying different aspects of the same beast? Pines proposed that what was needed was an umbrella term or theme that would describe all matter exhibiting emergent properties, whether it be hard, soft, or living matter. Such a term would reveal the commonality of interests among researchers in materials science, condensed matter experimental physics, theoretical physics, chemistry, and biology and thereby foster a more cooperative spirit. Pines suggested that an appropriate name might be complex adaptive matter.

This name resonated with a number of people at LANL, so that the following year the Center for Nonlinear Studies used complex adaptive matter as the theme of its 1997 annual conference. It brought together chemists, physicists, and biologists to discuss the emergent properties of the systems they were studying, and introduced the possibility of cooperative projects in which researchers from different, often competing, fiefdoms could work together on problems that fall at the boundaries between scientific disciplines.

Founding Workshop
Encouraged by the favorable response to this conference, Pines and Fisk proposed to Don Parkin, the Director of LANL’s Center for Materials Science (CMS), that LANL might profit from the establishment of an institute designed to promote the study of complex adaptive matter and that the idea could be explored by having CMS host a “founding” workshop on the topic. Parkin liked the concept and together they sent out invitations to a broad list of scientists representing many aspects of complex adaptive matter. Some 65 people responded positively, sending along as their ticket of admission a brief statement of their views on the importance or desirability of creating a new kind of institute to study complex adaptive matter.

The founding workshop was scheduled to coincide with another meeting in November, 1998, one that celebrated the success of another Parkin initiative, the opening of a pulsed high-magnetic-field laboratory at LANL that would be part of the NSF-supported National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, whose central facility was affiliated with Florida State University in Tallahassee. The workshop could therefore have in attendance key people from the UC Office of the President (UCOP) and NSF who were attending the NHMFL dedication, such as the UC Vice Chancellor for Research, Robert Shelton, and Lance Howarth, a leader of NSF’s Division of Materials Science. If the workshop went well, Fisk, Parkin, and Pines planned to go to the research leadership at both LANL and the University of California Office of the President for support, while Parkin would use some of his Center for Materials Science funding to jump-start the formation of an institute.

It is important to stress that a major goal of the workshop was to define, operationally, just what complex adaptive matter was and what an institute for its study could accomplish. The founders had the good sense to invite people from a broad range of disciplines in condensed-matter physics, biological physics, and biochemistry, and to ask each attendee to prepare a brief presentation, using two vugraphs or overhead transparencies (there were few PowerPoint users in the sciences then!) with his or her vision of complex adaptive matter. Then those present were broken into smaller groups to discuss what might be the topics for the first exploratory workshops. The presentation room crackled with intellectual energy, as notable scientists who had never met before discussed their complementary views on emergent behavior.

The main camps represented there were those who studied correlated electron materials, in which strong electron-electron interactions drive the interesting physics, and those who studied biological matter, in which the organizing principles, apart from evolution, remain to be determined. By the end of the workshop a remarkable coalition of scientists had arrived at a shared vision of an Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) and encouraged the organizers to move full speed ahead with putting the Institute in place. ICAM would be “distributed,” that is, not physically based in one place, and would involve researchers at LANL, the University of California, and a number of other major research institutions. Its mission would be to link together scientists in different fields to facilitate research in the study of emergent behavior in matter. The most important ways it would seek to accomplish this mission would be (a) to hold exploratory workshops on cutting-edge topics in complex adaptive matter; (b) to write accounts of the workshops for journals that reach a broad scientific audience; (c) to award travel grants permitting both junior and senior scientists to attend these workshops; and (d) to support followup activities that would nurture significant new collaborations.

Early Organization
Over that winter the details of ICAM’s organization and the funding fell into place, and it came into existence in March, 1999, as an independent unit of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), reporting via Robert Shelton’s office, with Don Parkin and David Pines as Co-Directors. David moved from Urbana to accept the Directorship and a five-year staff position at LANL with the understanding that he would be responsible for the external activities of ICAM, while Don would look after its role within the laboratory. Fiduciary oversight would be provided by a Board of Governors chaired by Zachary Fisk, scientific oversight by a Science Steering Committee, co-chaired by Robert Laughlin (Stanford) and Peter Wolynes (UCSD). Los Alamos provided support as well for Rose Romero who, beginning with its first workshop in 1999, has been the public face of ICAM as she coordinates and implements its workshops and symposia. In addition, LANL contributed $150,000 in core support for the Institute, a sum that was matched by UCOP. Additional early funding for workshops came from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and, in 2001, through a two-year grant of $150,000/yr from the National Science Foundation.

The initial workshop, “Adaptive Atoms: Mixed Valence in Chemistry, Biology, Physics, and the Environment,” involved both scientists studying correlated electron materials and those working in biological physics. Held at Los Alamos in June 1999, it was organized by physicists Zachary Fisk and Daniel Cox, biochemist Andrew Shreve, and environmental (actinide) chemist John Kaszuba. The multidisciplinary drive of the workshop led to participants’ writing and receiving a new Los Alamos LDRD award combining solid-state physics, high-speed optics, and novel chemistry.

Establishment of ICAM as a UC Multidisciplinary Program
During its first two years, the ICAM community expanded as it held a number of other exploratory workshops and symposia. These included one on Mesoscopic Organization in Matter which deserves special mention because the organizers worked together for three days following the workshop to prepare an overview of the field (“The Middle Way”, R.B. Laughlin, D.Pines, B. Stojkovic, J. Schmalian, and P. Wolynes, PNAS 97, 32-37, 2000) that was addressed to a general scientific audience. In the fall of 2001, the ICAM leadership decided to build upon its success in convening leading scientists for its activities, and nurturing the research collaborations that grew from these, by changing its status to that of a Multidisciplinary Research Program (MRP) of the University of California. Within this structure, each branch would contribute $10,000/yr to ICAM as its share of institutional supporting costs, thereby ensuring funding flexibility, while committing to spend an equal sum on its local branch activities. By April, 2002, when ICAM formally became an MRP of the University of California, nine institutions had signed on as founding branches. These were:

• Boston College
• Boston University
• UC Davis
• UC Riverside
• University of Chicago
• Florida State University
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Rutgers University.

Los Alamos was the lead campus, a status justified by the central role the lab played in the founding of ICAM and in support of its ongoing operations. This role, however, required a special exception to be granted, since MRP lead campus status is normally reserved for the universities in the UC system. The nine founding branches were joined in the following year by another twelve:

• UC Irvine
• UC San Diego
• Iowa State University
• Princeton University
• Max Planck Institute Consortium
• Paris Consortium
• University of Cambridge
• Kent State University
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Pennsylvania State University
• Sandia National Laboratory
• Karlsruhe Consortium

For a list of the current member institutions, see “Fifty-three Branches and Counting” in this issue of ICAMNEWS.

Leadership Changes and A Close Call on Funding
When Don Parkin decided to retire from LANL, the Institute turned to Arthur Ramirez to join David Pines as Co-Director. Ramirez had recently come to LANL from Bell Labs. Like Parkin, he would be the inside person, who would use the ICAM research node at LANL to help bring about some of the unification that Fisk and Pines had dreamed of in 1996. Ramirez served in this position until, for personal reasons, he decided to return to Bell Laboratories towards the end of 2003. He was succeeded by Greg Boebinger, who joined his ICAM/LANL portfolio to his duties as Leader of the LANL pulsed-magnetic-field facility, then as Deputy Director of LANL’s Materials Science and Technology Division, and subsequently as Director of the National High-Magnetic-Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida.

During this period, Pines continued as ICAM’s CEO and as its outside person, responsible for establishing new branches, organizing workshops, and looking for additional funding. The funding search encountered a significant obstacle in early 2003; despite the “proof of concept” provided by its continued growth and scientific impact, ICAM’s proposal for a renewal of core NSF funding met with a quite mixed set of reviews. NSF management agreed to consider providing interim support for specific workshops, but its long-term support was in doubt. ICAM was invited to send three representatives to a meeting of the Materials Science Directorate to make the case for continued support. In the early fall of 2003 Robert Austin (Princeton) and Piers Coleman (Rutgers) joined David Pines in an hour-long presentation to the Directorate. They were unexpectedly successful. Not only was ICAM encouraged to resubmit its proposal for NSF core funding, a proposal that ultimately was successful, but it was also encouraged to apply for a major NSF award for the establishment of an international materials network.

The Creation of I2CAM
The National Science Foundation was interested in encouraging international cooperation in the study of materials. ICAM already had two non-US branches, consortia in France and Germany, and was gaining experience in the operation of a international research network focused on the study of materials. In response to the NSF call for proposals, ICAM submitted, on December 1, 2003, a proposal to establish an International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (I2CAM). As part of ICAM it would, like its parent, be a distributed partnership of institutions, with the common goal of using fellowships, travel awards, exploratory workshops, and international schools to nurture a new generation of materials researchers to study emergent behavior in hard, soft, and living matter.

The details of the proposal had been carefully worked out, first during an October 2003 visit to Europe by David Pines, in discussions with colleagues at an Erice workshop and at three Dresden institutions—the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids and the MPI for Physics of Complex Systems, both members of the ICAM Max Planck Institute Consortium, and the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, which became an ICAM branch in February, 2004. These discussions led to a draft outline of the proposal that was then reviewed in depth by the thirty-five participants at ICAM’s November 2003 Annual Conference. After much dialogue, the proposal went to a smaller group to be written up in final form during the three weeks after the conference. The group was headed by Daniel Cox, professor of physics at UC Davis and co-organizer of the founding workshop on adaptive atoms, mentioned above, as well as of two workshops on physical science approaches to the proteins of amyloid diseases. Cox shepherded the final proposal to submission and developed the vision of what would comprise the I2CAM/ICAM web site. In brief, ICAM proposed to develop and run an international research and educational network designed to enable graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to acquire an international perspective on the study of complex adaptive matter at an early stage in their careers. Each year it would support:

• Fellowships for some 50-80 US graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to conduct collaborative research projects at leading European facilities for a period of two months to a year, and for some 12-20 European postdoctoral fellows from these centers to conduct similar collaborative research at their US counterparts;
• Research Travel Awards for some 40 especially promising junior and senior materials scientists for short-term visits to nurture existing US-European collaborative projects.
• Five Exploratory Workshops and one Summer School devoted to frontier topics in materials research that would include travel stipends to enable 150 US graduate students, postdoctoral Fellows, and lecturers to attend.
• Educational Travel Awards for 80 US graduate student and postdoctoral Fellows to attend other European workshops, summer schools, and conferences on emergent behavior in materials.

In addition, it would develop a presence on the World Wide Web in keeping with its vision of an “institution without walls.” Its web site would be used for science outreach, collaboration, applications for its awards, and tracking of I2CAM/ICAM activities. The proposal spelled out how the European and US branches would collaborate in organizing the workshops and conferences and choosing who was to receive fellowships and travel awards, as well as how oversight would be administered.

The proposal had asked for $1 million/year for five years. In May of 2004, I2CAM was approved at a funding level of $700,000/ year, with Daniel Cox serving as its CEO and Deputy Director of ICAM.

More Leadership Changes and Move of Administrative Center to Davis
For ICAM’s first seven years, LANL had served as lead campus for ICAM, while the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) in Oakland provided bookkeeping and financial administration. This arrangement became more cumbersome as ICAM grew. When management of Los Alamos was shifted to a semiautonomous corporation run only in part by the UC system, rather than a purely UC-run entity, UCOP ruled that Los Alamos could no longer retain its lead campus status, and ICAM began looking for a new home base. It decided on UC Davis, where Daniel Cox was in residence and David Pines had accepted a 1/3-time appointment in the Physics Department. In June of 2006 the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter established its new financial home on the Davis campus as part of an interdisciplinary research unit known as NEAT—Nanomaterials in the Environment, Agriculture and Technology.

At about the same time, David Pines announced his intention to step down from his position as CEO (though not as Co-Director), so that he could focus more of his energies on his teaching, research, and outreach, while Greg Boebinger indicated that in view of the demands on his time as Director of the NHMFL, he would have to step down as ICAM’s Co-Director. A search committee selected Daniel Cox to succeed him, and the Board of Governors approved the appointment of Cox as both CEO and Co-Director of ICAM.

Transferring a large organization from one administrative entity to another is a bureaucratic challenge which took about a year to work through. In his report to the Board of Governors in May of 2007, Cox described his efforts to put into place an accessible and responsive structure, with good web pages and the flexibility to develop research proposals and workshops without long lead times. “In this way, “ he says, “ICAM can catalyze science like no other organization I know.”

Cox also praised the ongoing commitment of ICAM’s Los Alamos branch in the form of continuing administrative support to David Pines and the services of our domestic workshop coordinator, Rose Romero. Their support remains a major contribution to the Institute.

Outreach: From the Emergent Matter Project to the Emergent Universe Alliance
To those studying emergent behavior in matter, the challenge and excitement of understanding its puzzles do not need to be pointed out. But materials science has not enjoyed the wide press coverage of some other branches of science. Subjects such as magnetism, high-temperature superconductivity, quantum criticality, and the world of nanophysics are largely unexplored territory to the general public. Even among students considering careers in science, the attractions of work on complex adaptive matter are often underappreciated. An important component of ICAM’s mission is to remedy this situation.

The area of greatest potential interest to the public is the frontier that connects inanimate matter to biology and life itself. How can particles that do not themselves exhibit the qualities of life form living and sentient beings? To tap into interest in this mystery, to create a more informed public, and to attract bright young scientists to the study of complex adaptive matter, ICAM established the Emergent Matter Project. With seed money from the NSF (as a supplement to its existing grant) it began work on a short video about quantum criticality and other emergent phenomena in condensed matter, using footage obtained during the March, 2003, ICAM workshop on Quantum Criticality. It then obtained a grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation to hold an August, 2004 workshop, “Telling the Emergent Matter Story,” that brought together leaders in science outreach from the museum and film worlds with a distinguished group of ICAM scientists. During the workshop, additional video materials were obtained and were combined with the earlier footage on a website established for this purpose by Piers Coleman, http://musicofthequantum.rutgers.edu.

As a result of discussions at two subsequent workshops held with support from the Lounsbery Foundation, ICAM decided to initiate SuperNet, an educational network focused on developing educational modules for middle and high school students. Modeled on Fermilab’s QuarkNet (http://quarknet.fnal.gov), Supernet is a first step towards the development of a high-school-level introductory science course on “The Emergent Universe.” The network links high school teachers and their students with communities of scientists associated with ICAM branch institutions and provides educational materials that can be accessed via the Internet. The first topics to be addressed by SuperNet were superconductivity and superconducting materials.

SuperNet began with a pilot program led by Marjorie G. Bardeen, Manager of the Fermilab Education Office, to encourage student investigations based on data from superconductivity research. The idea was that these would be undertaken in time to celebrate BCS @ 50, the fiftieth anniversary of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer’s ground-breaking article on the theory of superconductivity. She obtained a grant of $30,000 to use as seed money in support of a project leader, a developer/teacher-leader, and ten local teachers, and organized a workshop for this group at Fermilab in the summer of 2006.

Thanks to support from Trinity Capital Corporation and branch member institutional supporting costs funding, ICAM has been able to broaden the network to include nodes in Tallahassee, FL, Princeton, NJ, Urbana, IL, and Columbus, OH. News articles on two events organized by members of the network can be found at http://icam-i2cam.org/icamnews/?p=92 (Columbus) and http://icam-i2cam.org/icamnews/?p=3 (Tallahassee). Additional nodes are planned in Santa Fe and Los Alamos, NM and in Davis, CA. Also planned are an expansion of the program to include other aspects of emergent behavior in living as well as inanimate matter. Professor Vladimir Dobrosavljevic (NHMFL and Florida State University) has succeeded Marjorie Bardeen as the SuperNet project leader.

ICAM also foresees broadening its outreach and educational charter to include emergent behavior in social and economic systems and for that purpose has established the Emergent Universe Alliance, whose strategy and plans for conveying the science of emergent behavior to the general public can be found at http://www.eualliance.org. It encourages and supports outreach activities at ICAM branches, such as the science fair held at Sabanci University, covered in ICAMNews http://icam-i2cam.org/icamnews/?p=25.

The centerpiece of the Emergent Universe Alliance and ICAM’s most recent and ambitious effort at outreach is the creation of a website about emergence designed to appeal to nonspecialists and younger users. This site, to be called emergentuniverse.org, is now in preparation. It will feature a variety of displays, animation, and activities for self-guided exploration, with the goal of going live during the summer of 2008. To read more about this project, see http://icam-i2cam.org/icamnews/?p=13.

An adjunct to this kind of site, potentially appealing to a broader audience, is ICAMipedia, a source of articles on different aspects of emergence, modeled on Wikipedia.

Where Do We Go from Here?
In just eight years, ICAM-I2CAM has grown from nine founding branches to over fifty, representing over eighty institutions, with more waiting in the wings. Its workshop alumni number in the thousands, with participants coming from extremely diverse fields: Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Materials Science, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Geology, Biochemistry, Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, Neuroscience, and a number of departments in Medical Schools. And as the Institute evolves, its initial focus on correlated electron matter, reflecting the orientations of the founders, is being balanced by an increasing emphasis in its workshops and symposia on soft and biological matter.

When asked for his vision of what lies ahead for ICAM-I2CAM, Daniel Cox replied:

“ I am quite excited about concretizing the virtual organization aspect of ICAM through online research communities of the kind suggested by Hilal Lashuel at our EPFL branch in Lausanne for amyloid matter. The idea here is to develop online sites that are go-
tos for information, collaborative projects, research literature, online modeling systems, etc. If we encourage workshops that aim to develop such sites for new research areas, we can enable more rapid progress in lots of additional exciting areas, such as neuroscience and novel materials that enhance our energy supplies.”

Founder David Pines adds his expectation that ICAM will continue to be an agent for change, broadening both its scientific interests and its international and domestic base, while establishing research networks in promising subfields, such as that envisioned for DCHEM, the Distributed Center for Heavy Electron Materials (see http://www.dchem.org and the article in the October, 2007 issue of ICAMNews). He finds it exciting to be a part of the work of sharing the “emergent perspective,” both within and beyond the scientific community, and hopes that the coming decade will see the Institute’s educational and outreach efforts through the Emergent Universe Alliance develop into a seamless educational network that increases public awareness of the emergent universe in which we all live.

By David Pines, Daniel Cox, and Karie Friedman ICAMNews, January 2008