Gary An

Dr. Gary An is an Associate Professor of Surgery and the co-Director of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at the University of Chicago. In addition to being an active clinician he is a Senior Fellow of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. He is a graduate of the University of Miami, Florida School of Medicine, and did his surgical residency at Cook County Hospital/University of Illinois, Chicago. He was previously a Trauma Surgeon at Cook County Hospital from 1997 to 2003, the Director of the Burn Intensive Care Unit at Cook County Hospital from 2003-2006 and a Trauma Surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, IL 2006 to 2010. He is a founding member of the Society of Complexity in Acute Illness (SCAI) and is the current president of the Swarm Development Group, one of the original organizations promoting the use of agent-based modeling for scientific investigation. He is member of multiple medical and computer science societies, and serves on the editorial board of several journals.

He has worked on the application of complex systems analysis to sepsis and inflammation since the late 1990s, primarily using agent based modeling to create mechanistic models of various aspects of the acute inflammatory response, work that has evolved to the use of agent-based models as a means of dynamic knowledge representation to integrate multiple scales of biological phenomenon. The impetus for his work is the recognition that the Translational Dilemma has arisen from a bottleneck in the scientific cycle at the point of experiment and hypothesis evaluation. His research involves the development of: mechanism-based computer simulations in conjunction with biomedical research labs, high-performance/parallel computing architectures for agent-based models, artificial intelligence systems for modular model construction, and community-wide meta-science environments, all with the goal of facilitating transformative scientific research.

He became interested in this line of research when, as a Trauma Surgeon at Cook County Hospital in the 1990's he became frustrated not only with the lack of drugs with which to treat his injured patients, but the fact that the drug development pipeline that would at least offer the promise of new therapies down the road did not appear to have learned from its failures. At that time he happened to read "The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution" by John Brockman, the last section of which introduced him to the concept of Complex Adaptive Systems. The description of those complex systems struck a chord seemingly all too familiar to him from the setting of the Trauma Unit, and spurred Gary to contact the Santa Fe Institute, specifically the group working on the agent-based modeling software tool Swarm, in order to find researchers working with agent-based modeling (a means of doing complex systems analysis) in the biomedical arena. Finding no others at that time, he accepted an invitation of the Swarm group to attend their annual conference in 1999, and upon attending, became a inspired to work in this area. Despite having no formal research background and not being in an academic setting, Gary started upon a road aimed at bringing awareness of the role of dynamic computational modeling in meeting the challenges facing first the critical illness research community, but later extending to the biomedical research endeavor at large. He remains committed to this path to this day.