Kelso Named a Pierre de Fermat Laureate

APS Fellow Scott Kelso has been named a Pierre de Fermat Laureate, a prestigious French honor conferred by an international panel of scientists representing the Republic of France and the University of Toulouse.

de Fermat Laureates are awarded a “chair of excellence” that provides financial support to develop international collaborative research programs with French scholars.  Kelso, who is Florida Atlantic University’s Eminent Scholar in Science and Founding Director of the university’s Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, is one of the pioneers in the field of coordination dynamics, the science of coordination, which has led to many applications and developments in the neural, cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences.

The award “came as a great surprise,” said Kelso. But a very welcome one; he plans to use the award to develop a collaborative program between his center at FAU and the Institute of Neuroscience in Toulouse.  This will allow Kelso “to continue the research on human skill learning with Professor Pier-Giorgio Zanone and his group (LAPMA) at the Institute of Neuroscience … that [they] began over 20 years ago.” Kelso hopes that this joint effort will bring new understanding of the connections between the mechanisms of change that enable human learning and the mechanisms of change that occur on much greater timescales, but also influence learning, like development and evolution. ♦