I work as a complex systems scientist, aiming to understand how we can transform societies to a sustainable metabolic balance with nature across levels from local to global. I lecture and research at the Wegener Centre for Climate and Global Change within the University of Graz and am associate faculty of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. My research and teaching deal with relations between complexity, metabolism, agency and transformation in social-technical-ecological systems. Broadly, I study how social and economic dynamics co-evolve with the stocks and flows of energy and materials that underlie them. Much of my work focuses on developing mathematical and computational models using methods like dynamical systems/system dynamics, agent-based modelling and evolutionary computation, often embedded in multilayer networks.

I’m interested in ecological, biophysical & complexity economics, energetics, resilience, cooperation science & evolutionary biology, biophysics & physiology, multiscale modelling, foundations of complex systems, physics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, history, arts and low-emissions travel by train and bike.

I used to work in the Section for Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna, at Stockholm Resilience Centre and in the Biophysics of Photosynthesis and Energy Systems centre at the VU University Amsterdam. I completed my PhD in theoretical biophysics, on multilevel energetics in photosynthesis, within the Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems and Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane. During that time, I was a visiting scholar at the Japanese National Institute of Informatics, at the University of California, Berkeley College of Chemistry and at Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Also at UQ, I completed an Honours (Master-equivalent) degree in theoretical physics (quantum foundations) within the Centre for Quantum Computer Technology, and Bachelor degrees in Science (mathematical physics) and Arts (philosophy [epistemology/metaphysics/mind/science] and psychology [cognitive/neuro/evolutionary]).

In other lives, I’ve worked as a small business founder/manager, dance teacher/performer and actor. My wandering path has left me with the useless distinction of an Erdős-Bacon number of 7 (E:4, B:3).

I had the good fortune to grow up in Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, the natural beauty of which helped to shape my love of Nature.

The content of this website does not represent any of the above organisations.