Towards Systems Agriculture: On Predicting and Controlling (Hyper)complex Systems

Event Details

Type

Monday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Stanislas Leibler, Ph.D., Gladys T. Perkin Professor and head, Laboratory of Living Matter, The Rockefeller University

Speaker bio(s)

Understanding how one can mitigate water scarcity, soil infertility, and the impact of heat waves is essential to guaranteeing food security in the years to come. In his talk, Dr. Leibler will first describe some basic facts about the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and contrast them with modern intensive agriculture. Then, Dr. Leibler will present the results of recent work, done in collaboration with Dr. Belga Fedeli (IAS Princeton), that examines intercropping, the practice of growing different plants together. Intercropping is considered a promising alternative to conventional agriculture, as it requires limited inputs and often provides comparable yields. To be widely adopted, it is imperative to assess its success, robustness, and controllability in diverse environmental contexts. Based on a dataset regrouping the results of thousands of experiments, they established the foundations of intercropping design and control. Their results represent a prefatory step on the way to more robust and sustainable multi-plant agriculture. They also teach us a lesson on predicting and controlling the behavior of (hyper)complex biological systems.

Stanislas Leibler received his doctorate in theoretical physics and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Paris. After completing a postdoc at Cornell University, he became a research fellow with tenure at the Saclay Research Center in France. He moved to Princeton University in 1992 and joined Rockefeller in 2001, where he is currently the Gladys T. Perkin Professor and head of the Laboratory of Living Matter. Leibler is also a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—a position he has held since 2009. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

MLS lectures are only open to the RU community and will be taking place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. Virtual participants are required to log in with their RU Zoom account and use their RU email address and password for authentication. We recommend signing out of VPN prior to logging in to the lecture. Please do not share the link or post on social media.

Open to

Campus Only