Institute for Scientific Methodology

ISEM Home > Profile

Research

The ISEM (Institute for Scientific Methodology) starts out as a place for critical thinking and education on the role of science in culture and society. Based in Palermo, Italy, the institute conducts educational, research and cultural activities.

The institute -- a consortium among the CNR, the City of Bagheria, the University of Palermo and the Sicily section of Confederation of Italy Industry's -- is led by research chemist Mario Pagliaro and by theoretical physicist Ignazio Licata.

Its aim -- summarized in its slogan "Bringing science back into culture" -- is to act as a leading international educational and research center whose distinctive competence is its approach to science, teaching and research which emphasizes the consequences -- for management, education, public communication and much else --  of bringing science back into culture. 

Research

The Institute will lead frontier-research in chemistry, physics and biology.

In theoretical physics, under the guidance of Ignazio Licata (Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at Pal Harbor, USA), focusing on mathematical models in theoretical biology and cognitive epistemology. The chosen areas will be the strongly interdisciplinary ones: bio and quantum computing, nanotechnologies, symbolic and sub-symbolic systems for knowledge representation, quantum systemics.

 In chemistry, with the versatility which has marked, in the last five years, the MPL Laboratory at Palermo's CNR as one of the most important research team for its wide-spanning contributions (from catalysis to sensoristics, from science of materials to renewable substances, from photo-chemistry to synthesis) in collaboration with 11 different countries.