Career
Rosen was born on June 27, 1934 in Brownswille (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 known as 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 is survived by his wife, a daughter, Judith Rosen, and two sons.
He served as president of the Society for General Systems Research, (now known as ISSS), in 1980-81.
Read more about this topic: Robert Rosen (theoretical Biologist)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)