Robert Rosen

Robert Rosen was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.

Rosen was born on June 27, 1934 in Brownsville (a section of Brooklyn), in New York City. He studied biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and history; particularly, the history of science. In 1959 he obtained a PhD in relational biology, a specialization within the broader field of Mathematical Biology, under the guidance of Professor Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago. He remained at the University of Chicago until 1964, later moving to the University of Buffalo — now part of the State University of New York (SUNY) — at Buffalo on a full associate professorship, while holding a joint appointment at the Center for Theoretical Biology.

His year-long sabbatical in 1970 as a visiting fellow at Robert Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California was seminal, leading to the conception and development of what he later called Anticipatory Systems Theory, itself a corollary of his larger theoretical work on relational complexity. In 1975, he left SUNY at Buffalo and accepted a position at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a Killam Research Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, where he remained until he took early retirement in 1994. He died on December 28, 1998. 

He served as president of the Society for General Systems Research, now known as the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), in 1980-81.