Leading Epistemic Advances for Paradigm-Transitions

What We Do

We develop conceptual frameworks, mathematical models, and applied cases of phenomena where the reductionist or rationalist paradigm fails due to the systemic or seemingly irrational nature of the object of study. Of special interest are interdisciplinary phenomena with several entities and complex contextual interactions, such as metabolic and ecological systems, human-environment relations, socio-technological adaptations, and creativity-able systems.

We were first called SYMP (Systemic Modeling and Applications) and meet every second week since August 2021! We changed our name on January 2025 after an internal evaluation due to:

Director Tomas Veloz became ZAP
Increase of members to 10+ (5+PhD Students plus varios involved Senior Researchers)
An extension of research scope on systems, from modeling to paradigm-transitions

Check our calendar of activities here

We embody self-organization as a research group:

The group is self-organized. We try to minimize hierarchies at the decision-making level. The operation of the group is mostly done by students who coordinate meetings, summaries, questions, projects, etc. We regularly run seminars to know more about interesting topics from people in our network. Various of the outreach activities of CLEA (conferences, workshops, seminars) emerge from this group. You can see a list of our past activities at the bottom of the page (watch our invited seminars here).

International and interdisciplinary by default:

This group is led by Tomas Veloz. The group has active postgraduate students living in more than 5 countries and collaborates with researchers from multiple countries and research fields.

Senior members:

Prof. Christian Jendreiko (HSD, Germany, Design)
Prof. Diederik Aerts (CLEA, Belgium, Quantum Cognition)
Stefan Leijnen (HU, The Netherlands, Artificial Intelligence)
Dirk Bruin (CLEA, Belgium, Conflict Modeling)

Active Students: Click here for detailed student descriptions and their roles in the group

Matthew McCarthy (VUB, Belgium)
Floor Schukking (VUB, Belgium & University of Utrecht, the Netherlands)
Marcus Wetzler (Berlin University of the Arts, Germany)
Gabriel Herrera (Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, Chile)
Olha Sobetska (University of Leipzig, Germany)
Fabricio Moreno (Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, Mexico)
Daniela Flores (Universidad de Chile)
Tajana Reznić Brenko (Singidunum University, Serbia)
Zann Gill (VUB, Belgium)
Joeriggo Reyes (University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines)
Brynn McNab (Concordia University, Canada)

Previous members

Prof. Peter Dittrich (BioSystems Analysis Group, Jena Center for BioInformatics, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany)
Prof. Jorge Soto Andrade (Universidad de Chile)
Prof. Aura Reggiani (University of Bologna, Italy)
Stan Bundervoet (CLEA, Belgium)
Dr. Vincenzo de Florio (CLEA, Belgium, Complex Systems)
Liubov Tupkina (CRI-Paris, France, Complex Systems)
Marc Santolini (CRI-Paris, France, Complex Systems)

History and Motivation

The Centre Leo Apostel has been involved in the development of interdisciplinary research since the 90s being a pioneer in Europe and the world. The collaboration between Francis Heylighen and Tomas Veloz around interdisciplinary complex systems modeling has steadily grown since 2015. In particular, the framework of Chemical Organization Theory (COT) has been applied in CLEA since then and was central to the past CLEA research grant “THE ORIGINS OF GOAL-DIRECTEDNESS: A FORMAL SCENARIO BASED ON CHEMICAL ORGANIZATION THEORY AND CYBERNETICS” (a.k.a. Origins grant), funded by the Templeton Foundation between December 2020 and October 2023 (whose co-PI’s were Francis Heylighen, and Tomas Veloz), which helped us to develop a scenario for the self-organization of goal-directedness from a systemic perspective, applying COT as a systemic modeling framework.

The Origins grant involved a work-package related to goal-directedness in creativity. In this vein, and in coincidence with previous exchanges around the application of Systemic Modeling for creative processes between Christian Jendreiko and Tomas Veloz, the group emerged as an initiative involving teaching and research of systemic modeling applied to design and arts, in May 2021.

The regularity of our meetings and the diversity of ideas around systemic modeling turned the group into a place that attracts students and researchers from multiple areas such as urban planning, cognitive science, computational biology, interdisciplinary studies, complex systems modeling, and so on. Therefore, the SYMP group became a venue to foster interdisciplinarity with a strong scientific character, giving a chance to students to collaborate and exchange knowledge relevant for their theses, as well as being in touch with experts on a regular basis.