The Agora Institute for Integrative Biology is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institute that advances a rigorous, cross-scale science of living systems. We study adaptivity across levels in biology, from cellular and physiological processes to organismal behavior and ecological dynamics. We are primarily interested in both the robustness and plasticity of adaptive dynamics, where robustness describes the ability to function in a variety of circumstances and plasticity describes a behavior’s ability to serve changing needs or multiple purposes. Our mission is to develop mechanistic theories, models, and tools that explain how living systems persist, coordinate, and change over time.

Agora was founded to help close a gap in the contemporary life and cognitive sciences: while the data we have access to is constantly growing and improving in its fidelity, there has been a comparative lag in our conceptual understanding. Many treatments of adaptive dynamics are geared towards forecasting the behavior of specific systems using specialized and sometimes black-boxed models. While these approaches are essential and immense in their success, relying on them alone obscures the mechanisms underlying these phenomena, preventing us from identifying generalizable principles that span these narrow instances. In many fields, this has culminated in a mounting call-to-action for the development of rigorous theoretical frameworks within the behavioral and life sciences. Agora exists to address this gap by creating a scientific home for integrative and comparative research across levels of biological organization. Our approach is not only interdisciplinary in method, but truly integrative in explanatory scope.

An Agora (ἀγορά) was an open, public gathering place in ancient Greece where citizens would come to discuss politics, philosophy, art, and education. Amazingly, the echoes of these discussions can still be felt quite strongly to this day. 

Familiar names such as Aristotle, Pythagorus, and Hippocrates were common participants in these forums, whose ideas would come to help form the foundation of our modern notions of democracy, medicine, science and mathematics. 

A powerful feature of the Agora is that it is interdisciplinary by it's very foundation, both in terms of the fields that people are weaving together as well as socially - they provide a place in which the foundation of knowledge is formed by productive exchange as opposed to dished out to below from those up high. The act of reasoning and investigation is in the dialectic and the exchanges brought about by people in discourse. 

It is in this sentiment that we adopt the label of an Agora. We foresee a future in which everyone from amateurs to experts are able to participate in the discovery and description of living systems, their behavior, and their interface with one another and ourselves. We see a world in which experts in the life sciences have ample opportunities to connect their research and expertise to that of their fellow scientists via clear, tractable, and robust theory. In such a scientific community, progress is not limited by disciplinary boundaries, and scientists are encouraged to broaden their toolkits rather than defend a narrow portion. As such, we believe a robust theory of living systems will improve the scientific community by encouraging both collaboration and humility. Living systems are rich beyond the capacity of any individual discipline or person to grasp. It is only through working together that we can understand and beneficially engage with life around us. The integrative science of living systems we envision is therefore a truly communal science, one that is not proprietary but instead only fully realized by our collective action.