ISING LECTURERS-2011

Serge Galam (Personal webpage )

Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée

Serge Galam is a French physicist specialized in disordered systems. In 1981 he completed his PhD at the University of Tel Aviv. A senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research, in 2014 he joined the CEVIPOF becoming the first physicist there. In the eighties he envisioned and initiated sociophysics, which today is a flourishing field of research. Besides major contributions in condensed matter and statistical physics he has produced a series of founding models to investigate social and political behavior. His numerous works include voting in hierarchical systems, group decision making, the stability and fragmentation of alliances among countries, minority opinions spreading, rumor phenomenon, radicalization, terrorism, and opinion dynamics. His models have yielded successful predictions in the 2005 French referendum on the European constitution and the Trump election. In 2002 he warned against the likelihood of the Brexit scenario.

Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron (Personal webpage )

Wroclaw University of Science and Technology

Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron is a Professor in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. Formerly she was head of the Complex Systems and Nonlinear Dynamics Division and UNESCO Chair of Interdisciplinary Complex Systems at the University of Wroclaw.

Her research focuses on applications of statistical physics (mainly simple lattice models and the theory of phase transitions) in a variety of complex systems, including social and biological. A model of opinion dynamics, developed by her in 2000 is known in literature as the Sznajd model and has been cited approximately 600 times (according to Web of Science). In 2007 she was awarded a prestige worldwide Young Scientist Award in Socio- and Econo-physics for her original contribution to the better understanding of open problems in socio-economic systems by means of physical methods.