Dirk Brockmann is director of the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TU Dresden and professor for Biology of Complex Systems in the Departments of Biology and Physics. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen, where he received his PhD in theoretical physics.
Before becoming founding director of SynoSys he was professor at Humboldt University of Berlin and led a research team at the Robert Koch Institute. Between 2008 and 2013 he was professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University and faculty member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.
Dirk has worked on topics ranging from computational neuroscience and anomalous diffusion to infectious disease dynamics, human mobility, network theory and citizen science. He pioneered the analysis of mass data obtained in natural experiments. During the COVID-19 pandemic he launched the German Data Donation Project, in which more than 500,000 donors provided smartwatch data on a daily basis for over 2.5 years — the largest dataset of this kind in public hands worldwide.
He believes in anti-disciplinary science and is particularly interested in bridging biological and social sciences. He coined the phrase "Get lost in Science!" to stress the importance of explorative research. In 2017 he launched Complexity Explorables, a collection of interactive models of complex systems.
Currently, Dirk is most interested in citizen science project design, the emergence of cooperation, mutualism and fungi.