From cell collectives to coral reefs, cities to cloud formations, this project began with a growing interest in the insurmountable challenge of understanding biological and physical systems which operate over many scales. The mystery of how and why minute interactions between many agents can together lead to higher levels of coordination and organisation is a ripe question for the interdisciplinary field of complexity science. This project explores how a novel multilevel simulational approach might help us better study complex phenomena, poised between a real-world biological case study and a proposal for an abstract and generalisable simulation framework.

I aim to develop a simulation prototype - the start of a multilevel model for plant leaf growth - driven by real specimen data and designed towards the present identifiable hurdles in interdisciplinary collaboration between biology and computer science. I conduct a thorough review of the emerging literature towards the question: how do plant leaves get their shape? I use these practical insights to evaluate whether this approach could serve more widely as a scalable framework for complex modelling.

Complex systems are challenging to model because of their many heterogeneous agents arranged in hierarchies spanning many scales. Emergent behaviour arises from their ‘multiscale’ couplings - causal chains that operate over broad spatiotemporal scales, leading to non-linearity and non-trivial feedback loops. This makes them less amenable to reduction by conducting isolated studies. The goal is ultimately to wire together an extensible toolkit for diverse stakeholders like biologists, engineers and computer scientists. I prototype a networked design that allows trivial interfacing of isolated simulations with a zoomable preview.

I conduct a case study investigating morphogenesis in plant leaves where cell-level analyses reveal a complex interplay of biochemical and mechanical factors. Morphogenesis is an ever-growing field seeking to answer questions about the way living cells coordinate their activity locally to grow intricate yet stable global patterns we know as tissues. Even plant cells embody significant complexity, containing an entire inner dynamic scaffolding called a cytoskeleton, and sophisticated organelles like chloroplasts with their own DNA. I use a multilevel approach as it aligns with the current theory about how eukaryotic (animal, plant, fungus) cells arose.  Specifically, it is important to consider endosymbiosis when an earlier form of life engulfed another and the forms continued to co-exist harmoniously.

Current approaches are siloed and although I cannot aim not to model all factors, I hope to scaffold a platform that could offer new perspectives on this issue. The interdisciplinary tension between the reductive power of mathematical modelling and the complex biological theory is apparent from conversations with researchers.