Research Faculty (Research Professor)

Professor Ivanov, PhD, DSc, is Director of the Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology at Boston University. He and his research group have introduced a series of innovative approaches to analyze and model physiological systems by adapting and developing concepts and methods from modern statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and networks theory. The developed analytic and computational methods are specifically tailored to extract information embedded in noisy, nonstationary and nonlinear physiological signals. His lab has investigated the complex dynamics and underlying control mechanisms of a range of physiological systems, including studies on cardiac and respiratory dynamics, sleep-stage transitions, circadian rhythms, locomotion and brain dynamics, and has pioneered approaches sensitive to probe transient pair-wise interactions between physiological systems. Work in the lab has led to the discovery of basic laws of physiologic regulation and the development of adequate models.

Professor Ivanov has pioneered the study of dynamic network interactions of physiological and organ systems. He is the originator and founder of the interdisciplinary field of Network Physiology. Current work in the Keck lab focuses on developing methods of data analysis to investigate time varying interactions among diverse organ systems. The aim is to build a theoretical framework to understand how physiologic states and functions at the organism level emerge out of organ network interactions, and how diverse organ systems coordinate and integrate their functions to produce health or disease. This work lays the foundation of the Human Physiolome, a new type of BigData, containing streams of continuously recorded, high frequency, synchronized physiological signalsfrom multiple systems under various states and clinical conditions, with an associated dynamic Atlas of network maps representing interactions among physiological systems and subsystems at different levels in the human organism.

Results of these investigations have been published in leading journals, including Nature, Nature Communications, Science Advances, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, Communications Biology, The Journal of Neuroscience, New Journal of Physics, Biophysical Journal. The discoveries of Professor Ivanov and his team members have been broadly featured in the Media, including Scientific American, Science News, Nature Science Update, New Scientist, Physics World, Nature Medicine Research Highlights, Washington Post, Futurity Magazine, The Boston Globe.

Professor Ivanov is the Field Chief Editor of the journal Frontiers in Network Physiology. He is the founding Director of the International Summer Institute on Network Physiology (ISINP), Lake Como School of Advanced Study. Professor Ivanov is one of nine founding members of PhysioNet — the first NIH-sponsored data sharing research resource with millions of users and data downloads. He has served as editorial and advisory board member for several leading journals, including New Journal of Physics, EPL (Europhysics Letters), EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics, Journal of Biological Physics (JOBP), Physiological Measurement and Frontiers in Physiology. Research in his lab has been funded by NIH, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). In 2015 his lab won a prestigious $ 1 million W.M. Keck Foundation Award to pioneer empirical and theoretical investigations in Network Physiology.