Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences
Promoting collaboration across the theoretical sciences

About ITS

Promoting collaboration across the theoretical sciences

The goal of ITS is to provide a home for research and teaching, emphasizing theoretical approaches to the natural sciences.  Participants are interested in a wide range of phenomena, from the elementary building blocks of matter to the dynamics of social systems, from the collective behavior of electrons in solids to the collective behavior of neurons in the brain, and more.  What ties these disparate problems together is the search for a compact and compelling mathematical description of the world around us.

We are a community of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, students and visitors.  We host a wide range of events, from single seminars to day-long symposia and longer conferences, the details of which you can explore in these pages.  We encourage you to participate, and to make suggestions for new programs (follow links under Opportunities).  Understanding that the best stimulus to theory often comes from experiment, many of our events are focused on recent experimental developments.

The ITS interacts with the programs at The Graduate Center and throughout the CUNY system.  In addition, we are partners with Princeton University in the Center for the Physics of Biological Function, a Physics Frontiers Center supported by the National Science Foundation.