Professor Bar-Yam studies systems and organizations and develops new scientific methods to understand their behavior and how they fulfill social goals and objectives. His research is focused on dynamic patterns of behavior, characterizing effectiveness, formation through evolution, and how to improve the systems around us.

Professor Bar-Yam is interested in the unified properties of complex systems as a systematic strategy for addressing scientific questions and social concerns. His research is focused both on formalizing complex systems concepts and relating them to everyday problems. In particular, he is interested in the relationship between observations at different scales, formal properties of descriptions of systems, the relationship of structure and function, the representation of information as a physical quantity, and quantitiative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to social, biological and physical systems.

Professor Bar-Yam is is author of Making Things Work and Dynamics of Complex Systems. He is chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems and managing editor of InterJournal.