Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

COMPLEX TIME: Adaptation, Aging, & Arrow of Time

Get Involved!
Contact: Caitlin Lorraine McShea, Program Manager, cmcshea@santafe.edu

Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging/HeatherWhitson

From Complex Time

Notes by user Heather Whitson (Duke Univ.) for Dynamic Multi-System Resilience in Human Aging

Post-meeting Reflection

1+ paragraphs on any combination of the following:

  • Presentation highlights
  • Open questions that came up
  • How your perspective changed
  • Impact on your own work
  • e.g. the discussion on [A] that we are having reminds me of [B] conference/[C] initiative/[D] funding call-for-proposal/[E] research group

As a clinician, it resonated with me to hear Dr. Vural describe that in his models, sometimes "strategic repair" may be necessary in order to re-stabilize a complex system that is progressing toward critical decay (but has not yet reached the critical point). I like the notion that success or failure of the whole system could depend on the order of which nodes are repaired first. I am often faced with the clinical challenge of multi-organ failure and often an intervention that would benefit one organ system might put another at risk, so it is hard to know what sub-system to prioritize. If we could understand the human system better and it could guide "strategic repair," this could have real clinical utility.

It also resonated with me to hear Dr. Hoekstra's description of a similar stressor resulting in vastly different outcomes in his model systems. If there are feature of the system BEFORE or JUST AFTER the stressor that reliably indicate which outcome is going to occur, that would be very useful for prognostication and for making treatment decisions.

Dr. Gijzel's descriptions of data management challenges when dealing with time series human data was helpful (and also cathartic, because I deal with the same challenges). The tension about whether analytical decisions should be guided by conceptual framework and clinical judgment, as opposed to empirical decisions, was something I recognized.

I feel more strongly that the field will benefit from semantic harmonization and precise terminology.

My perspective has changed in that I will be more attentive to opportunities to study resilience changes across the lifespan. I learned about childhood metabolic changes I was not aware of. I learned a new parameter for characterizing temporal autocorrelation across varying lag times.

Reference material notes

Some examples:

  • Here is [A] database on [B] that I pull data from to do [C] analysis that might be of interest to this group (insert link).
  • Here is a free tool for calculating [ABC] (insert link)
  • This painting/sculpture/forms of artwork is emblematic to our discussion on [X]!
  • Schwartz et al. 2017 offers a review on [ABC] migration as relate to climatic factors (add the reference as well).

Reference Materials

Title Author name Source name Year Citation count From Scopus. Refreshed every 5 days. Page views Related file
Physical resilience in older adults: Systematic review and development of an emerging construct Heather E. Whitson, Wei Duan-Porter, Kenneth E. Schmader, Miriam C. Morey, Harvey J. Cohen, Cathleen S. Colón-Emeric Journals of Gerontology - Series A Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences 2016 105 6

Presenter on the following Agenda items

Resilience and vulnerability in a stressed system: an example from the wards

Presentation file
Download Presentation (Delete)
Related files

Upload a related file