Academic and Institutional Leadership

The founder and head of the interuniversity chair in Fluid Dynamical Systems is Prof. Dr. Rui A. P. Perdigão, also Chair Professor in Physics of Complex Systems and Climate Dynamics, founding Head of the Meteoceanics Institute for Complex System Science and of the associated Doctoral School, with presences across Europe and North America, including through the North Atlantic Climate Centre.

More recently, he has also founded the Interuniversity Institute for Intelligence, Complexity and Security, academic spinoff with extended offerings in Quantum Information and Security, Quantum Aerospace Intelligence and Quantum Technologies in the Earth and Space Sciences, leveraging his research, development and innovation in the quantum, aerospace, environmental, intelligence and security industries.

Moreover, Rui Perdigão has also served multiple editorial board terms in international journals including as Editor at Earth System Dynamics (European Geosciences Union), Section Editor-in-Chief at Climate, Associate Editor for Interdisciplinary Physics at Frontiers in Physics, along with scientific councils, evaluation and advisory panels from multiple international research and funding institutions.

University Teaching

For several years, Rui Perdigão has been designing, coordinating and delivering various university courses along with international courses, seminars and workshops. Some of his most relevant courses are linked to his inter university initiative and listed at the Meteoceanics Doctoral School.

Moreover, he has been collaborating with the Doctoral Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies, an interdisciplinary doctorate promoted primarily by the University of Lisbon and the New University of Lisbon, through academic supervision of multiple doctoral theses and through innovative course offerings.

There, he has introduced, been coordinating and delivering some of his interdisciplinary courses, including on Complex System Dynamics and on Interdisciplinary Data Analytics and Model Design, which he tailored to a broad audience beyond the natural and exact science frontiers, being deployed not only to engineering and natural science students but also to those coming from social sciences, economics and management.

With the launch of the Interuniversity Institute for Intelligence, Complexity and Security, these academic offerings are now mainly delivered across the participating institutions and tailored to their respective priorities, ranging from classic academic to technical, executive and operational, promoting synergies among academia, industry and society.

Moreover, he is involved in doctoral thesis supervision, coordinating doctoral research in interdisciplinary problems spanning climate system dynamics, socio-environmental complexity, multi-hazards and quantum technological enablement for these problems.

Scientific Alliances

Rui Perdigão chairs the international alliance for Quantum Information Technologies in the Earth Sciences (QITES), and also the NORA Research Alliance (the latter with co-coordinator Julia Hall).

Moreover, he has been conducting research, development and innovation in the aerospace industry especially for the development, deployment and operation of new quantum and post-quantum aerospace systems, information retrieval methods and model designs to further elicit multiscale Earth system dynamic processes and interactions from space constellations, along with early warning signs of emerging hazards. Since the inception of his own organizations, his prior industry workplaces became valued customers.

Across the Earth System sciences, Rui Perdigão has taken part in various initiatives. In earlier years, he contributed as postdoctoral researcher to the development of satellite application facilities for Earth monitoring in the scope of Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security (GMES), precursor of the Copernicus program from the European Union. In the most recent years, he has been leading the development of the System-of-Systems for Multihazard Risk Intelligence Networks as WP2 leader for C2IMPRESS, Horizon Europe project funded by the European Union.

In between, among other activities he was also at the core team of the “Flood Change” consortium, headquartered at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, and funded by the European Research Council.  There, he has contributed as Earth System Dynamics representative, responsible for the development of mathematical physics methods for deciphering coevolutionary hydro-climate dynamics and river flood changes in the light of complex Earth System interactions.  The collaborative effort resulted in the development of decision support products and in high-impact team publications, including in Science and in Nature.

Between 2019 and 2022 Rui Perdigão has revisited Lisbon, where he has been scientific council member of the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (CE3C) from the University of Lisbon, as research group leader for Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Modelling.

At the same time, he has also nurtured collaborations on Physics of Information with the Instituto de Telecomunicações at Instituto Superior Técnico from the University of Lisbon, and was co-founding signatory of the Portuguese Quantum Institute at its original incorporation.

In these areas, he pursues theoretical studies on the physical nature of information, the informational nature of physics, along with conceiving quantum information systems for addressing complex mathematical challenges beyond the realms of traditional quantum theory.  At a methodological level, he develops novel techniques for data exploration and model design of complex systems, and at a practical level he investigates new techniques for quantum technological sensing of environmental phenomena.

Scientific Background and Flow

Rui Perdigão holds a Doctorate in Physics with the highest honours. He has since then conducted independent and collaborative research on mathematical physics, predictability and uncertainty dynamics, from conceptual and methodological research to applications to information physics and fluid dynamical problems in natural sciences and engineering. He has also conducted R&D for large-scale international consortia, including the EU/ESA Copernicus Programme and the North Atlantic Alliance.

At a fundamental level, the research conducted by Rui Perdigão focuses on theoretical and methodological developments towards a novel theoretical physics paradigm bringing fundamental physical understanding to nonlinear dynamics and information theory. One of the core efforts in this regard has been the establishment of a nonlinear synergistic dynamic theory of complex coevolutionary systems, unveiling fundamental physical principles and canonic forms bringing complexity to its simplest yet fully generative form.

Rui’s theoretical advances are now being implemented in generalised fluid dynamical systems and complex coevolutionary systems to address fundamental physics problems ranging across scales from quantum gravitation to coevolutionary earth system dynamics and thermodynamic cosmology.  His research monographs, textbooks and courses share the most recent progress in these efforts and provide a unified framework bridging across the quantum-classical divide – with more to come.

With fluid dynamical system applications in mind relevant e.g. to the emergence of extreme events in climate dynamics, Rui Perdigão has developed a mathematical physics theory linking interaction information signatures in multiscale geophysical fluid dynamics with underlying mechanisms grounded on nonlinear scale interactions and synergistic emergence in wave mechanics and fluid flow.

In doing so, Rui Perdigão’s advances have brought out novel atmospheric insights on triadic wave resonance among planetary, synoptic and mesoscale waves in fundamental fluid dynamic terms, explaining observed information-theoretical and nonlinear signatures of emergence, and shedding further light on elusive emergent behaviours in multiscale atmospheric flow, e.g. behind far from equilibrium transient dynamics behind “extreme” meteorological phenomena.

Rui Perdigão has also introduced a non-ergodic coevolutionary theory of information physics, generalising information theory to the realm of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics, where there is event codependence and the traditional information theoretical measures do not hold. His novel measures unveil and quantify elusive sources of synergistic and coevolutionary predictability beyond post-critical spatiotemporal memory loss, long after nonlinear multi-information fades away. The collapse of dynamic regimes and nonlinear memory in far-from-equilibrium non-ergodic dynamics is thus no longer an obstacle for system understanding and prediction.

The theoretical advances from Rui Perdigão are now shedding light onto fundamental problems ranging across scales from evolutionary open quantum systems to coevolutionary earth system dynamics and thermodynamic cosmology, peering into the fundamental Physics of Evolutionary Complexity, and also shedding new light into Synergistic Dynamic Causation and Prediction in Coevolutionary Spacetimes.

Most of Rui Perdigão’s advances in Nonlinear Dynamics and Analytics have remained proprietary in Meteoceanics, securing a leading edge in providing decision support to institutions dealing with critical security challenges protecting the society and the environment. Even so, a subset of his work is available through his journal publications, academic courses and research monographs. These provide an overview of his most recent and ongoing original fundamental advances in mathematical physics, information physics and coevolutionary complexity, along with innovative methodological and technological developments – ranging from deep learning and artificial intelligence to quantum technologies – for empowering data analytics, modelling and decisions support to tackle critical challenges faced by our society and the environment.