Research / Areas of ResearchComplex Systems and Data Science
As we end the first fifth of the 21st Century, human societies face global challenges of unimaginable scale. Global pandemics pose the risk of killing millions of people and paralyzing economies. Climate change threatens coastal cities, imperils food supply chains, and contributes to the extinction of numerous species around the globe. Unlike many problems facing engineers in the past, the solution to these challenges involves not only the development of new technologies but also an accounting for human decisions and behaviors. For example, while the consequences of climate change pose particular large costs for coastal cities such as Houston, TX, the economic implications for the area of a decline in the importance of fossil fuels would be staggering.
These complex challenges require not reductionist approaches, or optimal technical strategies, but the understanding of the numerous interlocked components and sub-systems that are part of or interact with human societies. Complexity science has for the last 40 year developed a set of approaches and techniques that allows for the exchange of knowledge among the disciplinary silos and for the manipulation of objects without predefined roles or interactions. These include nonlinear dynamics, fractal geometry, statistical physics, network science, and recently, data science.
Faculty
Linda Broadbelt
Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Senior Associate Dean
Complex kinetics modeling, biological reaction networks, in silico molecule discovery, novel pathway discovery.
Jennifer Dunn
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Mechanical Engineering
Director, Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience
Associate Director, Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering
Ella King
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering (beginning on September 1, 2026)
Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (beginning on September 1, 2026)
Sam Kriegman
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Josh Leonard
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
We investigate emergent behavior in complex biological systems, including natural and therapeutically engineered immune functions. We also build synthetic biology technologies enabling the composition of complex biological circuits, networks, and systems.
Jeffrey Lopez
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Polymeric materials for energy storage applications, charge transport in polymer membranes, reactions at electrochemical interfaces, automated experimentation
Julius Lucks
Margery Claire Carlson Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
The Lucks Lab develops and applies computational algorithms and approaches to study molecular folding dynamics of nucleic acids, the dynamics and design of genetic circuits and large scale next-generation sequencing datasets.
Julio Ottino
Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Mechanical Engineering
Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor
Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Arthur Prindle
Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Biomedical Engineering
Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Krishna Shrinivas
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics and Cell and Developmental Biology
Randall Snurr
John G. Searle Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Machine learning, cheminformatics, high-throughput computational screening of materials.
Danielle Tullman-Ercek
James N. and Nancy J. Farley Professor in Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Director, Master of Science in Biotechnology Program
We use computational modeling and machine learning techniques to aid in our understanding of protein folding, protein self-assembly, and biological function.
Keith Tyo
Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Predicting enzyme behavior using cheminformatics and kinetic models to enable sustainable biosynthesis (in collab with Broadbelt).
Courtesy
Richard Lueptow
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering
Senior Associate Dean
The Lueptow lab combines modeling, simulation, and experiments to study mixing in granular materials and transport processes in polymeric materials.
Chad Mirkin
George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
Director, International Institute for Nanotechnology
Mirkin engineers functional and dynamic colloidal systems of immense complexity by cleverly tuning particle surface chemistry.
Milan Mrksich
Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Professor of Chemistry
Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology
The Mrksich lab uses the tools of organic chemistry, materials science and biochemistry to address important challenges in and at the intersection of chemistry and biology.
Monica Olvera de la Cruz
Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering, Physics and Astronomy
Director, Center for Computation & Theory of Soft Materials
Deputy Director, Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science
Email Monica Olvera de la Cruz
The Olvera de la Cruz group develops models to study the self-assembly and structure of amphiphiles, copolymers, and synthetic and biological polyelectrolytes as well as segregation and interface adsorption in multicomponent complex fluids.
Julio Ottino
Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Mechanical Engineering
Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor
Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
The Ottino/Lueptow lab combines modeling, simulation, and experiments to study mixing in granular materials and transport processes in polymeric materials.
Aaron Packman
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and (by courtesy) Mechanical Engineering and Chemical and Biological Engineering
The Packman group combines measurements and modeling to solve water challenges including urban flooding, water quality protection, ecosystem degradation & restoration, and waterborne disease transmission.