The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) was created by a group of scientists from research universities, national laboratories and government laboratories who see materials-driven research across the traditional disciplines as a new and rewarding frontier. Formally established in March, 1999, as a multi-institutional partnership in Los Alamos under the auspices of the University of California Office of the President, ICAM's nationally-based scientific agenda is focused on the study of complex adaptive matter -- the search for the organizing principles that govern emergent behavior in soft, hard, and biological matter. ICAM seeks to identify major new research themes in complex adaptive matter, and to nucleate and conduct collaborative research and scientific training that draws from the biological, chemical and physical viewpoints on these themes..

As a distributed Institute, ICAM will feature an array of experimental collaborations, but will have no institutional laboratory research facilities of its own. Its activities, initiated by the ICAM scientific community, focus on:

*organizing exploratory multidisciplinary workshops on promising research themes

*communicating the results to the broader scientific community

* developing multi-institutional, multidisciplinary experiment-based research teams, in which young scientists play a central role, to pursue topics growing out of these workshops

* establishing ICAM research nodes at leading research universities.

In addition, ICAM proposes to catalyze cutting-edge materials-driven research by establishing and supporting graduate student and postdoctoral programs, internships, research semesters, summer schools, sabbatical research, and conferences on complex adaptive matter.