Welcome to the Dynamics and Neural Systems Group!
The Dynamics and Neural Systems Group is an interdisciplinary research team in the School of Physics at The University of Sydney led by Ben Fulcher.
We do quantitative research focused on understanding the properties of complex dynamical systems by applying (and developing new) physical and statistical methods. We apply these tools to applications in neuroscience to gain a quantitative, physically based understanding of how the brain works.
We are located at The University of Sydney, which has a beautiful campus full of intelligent people and a vibrant interdisciplinary community that includes researchers in physics, maths, statistics, computer science, engineering, psychology, physiology, and biomedical science, all investigating the brain.
We are a part of Complex Systems Physics. Being an interdisciplinary group, we collaborate closely with diverse researchers, including information theory (like Joe Lizier), systems neuroscience (like Mac Shine), consciousness (like Nao Tsuchiya), and quantum mechanics (like Sahand Mahmoodian).
We are always looking for enthusiastic new students!
Our values
- We aim to foster and encourage authenticity of expression and an environment in which all types of people, personalities, backgrounds, and beliefs, feel supported.
- We are committed to producing science that is high-quality, makes meaningful contributions, is open, and is clearly, transparently, and honestly communicated.
- We believe that high-quality and creative science is possible when group members have the freedom to follow their interests, and can protect time free for fun, nourishing, and complementary life interests and pursuits.
- We aim to train students in a way that helps them understand themselves and their motivations well and can align them with problems that excite and motivate them.
- We aim to guide students to become independent thinkers, providing them with the skills and opportunities to do so.
- To ensure that we are continue to perform in accodance with these values, and can improve them, we regularly reflect on our values and practices and seek (anonymous) feedback on them from all team members.
News
10 April 2024Aria's new preprint is now out :)
3 March 2024Aria submitted her MPhil thesis on feature-based interactions between time-varying processes! A preprint should emerge soon :)
16 January 2024Annie's paper on extracting dynamical signatures from rs-fMRI using a combination of local and pairwise coupling measures is now out as a preprint!
25 October 2023Brendan's paper on noise-robust signatures of critical points is out today as a preprint.
20 October 2023Marija's paper on understanding fMRI signatures of mouse-brain striatal stimulation is out today in eLife.
3 October 2023Oliver and Annie's paper on unifying interactions in complex dynamics is now published in Nature Computational Science and a non-technical summary is in this article in The Conversation
3 August 2023New paper from undergraduate students on an information formulation of network participation: preprint.
3 July 2023Annie's added some new EEG and fMRI analyses to our preprint on quantifying pairwise interactions from time series.
10 April 2023Check out Trent and Annie's preprint on time-series classification (now accepted for the 2023 International Workshop on Temporal Analytics).