George Sugihara

George Sugihara is a theoretical biologist who has worked across a wide variety of fields, including landscape ecology, algebraic topology, algal physiology and paleoecology, neurobiology, atmospheric science, fisheries science, and quantitative finance. He is the inaugural holder of the McQuown Chair in Natural Science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Most of his early work was motivated exclusively by pure science, and the later work more by pragmatic utility and environmental concerns. Nearly all of it is based on extracting information from observational data (turning data into information). His initial work on fisheries as complex, chaotic systems led to work on financial networks and prediction of chaotic systems.

He is one of 18 members of the National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications, and was a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank. He helped found Prediction Company (sold to UBS) and Quantitative Advisors LLC. He has been a consultant to the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and to The Federal Reserve System on questions of international security: systemic risk in the financial sector.

Other notable research relates some of his early work on topology and assembly in ecological systems to recent work on social systems and work on generic early warning signs of critical transitions that apply across many apparently different classes of systems.