University of California, Los Angeles

Faculty Member, Human Complex Systems

Former Lecturer & Graduate Coordinator (program now dismantled)

Letters & Sciences

About

    John Bragin received a BA cum laude with a major in Motion Picture Production and a minor in Art History from UCLA in 1965, and returned to UCLA to do graduate work in evolutionary biology and philosophy of science which was cut short by a period of prolonged illness. He was in charge of Public and Continuing Education for UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution & the Origin of Life (CSEOL) from 1995 to 2006.

    In the Fall of 2007 he became a Core Faculty Member and Graduate Coordinator of the new Human Complex Systems Program at UCLA: an interdisciplinary program in the social sciences and organization management that trains students to use cutting-edge computational techniques to model the dynamics of human group phenomena. The Program was discontinued on December 31, 2011, due to a funding decision by the Dean of Social Sciences.

    Mr Bragin is now Deputy Director of the Marschak Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences.

    In October 2006 he was a co-organizer of "Sustaining Los Angeles: Shaping the future of our expanding Region", a conference presented by the UCLA Department of Urban Planning and co-sponsored by the UCLA Human Complex Systems Program.

    Mr Bragin was a co-founder of the CSEOL Computational Ecology & Evolution Group, for which he was co-convener of professional conferences on Molecular Evolution & Engineering, Computational Social Systems, and Female Choice in Primate Evolution. In the Fall of 2004 he co-convened the first annual UCLA Conference in the History & Philosophy of Science: Concepts of Cause in History, Physics and Biology.

    His science work has been published in PaleoBios and his science presentations include papers delivered at the conferences of the Society for Literature and Science, CalPaleo and the Human Behavior & Evolution Society. He is co-editor (with Bill McKelvey) of the five volume Routledge Major Works in Complexity Science (in preparation). From time to time he does science consulting for motion pictures and television. The best-known film on which he worked was the first X-Men motion picture.

    Over the past decade he has designed, coordinated and often co-taught over 20 different public lecture and continuing education science series including Highlights in the History of Life, Patterns and Processes in Evolution, Evolution & the Fossil Record, The Origin and Development of the Universe, Highlights in the History of Medicine, Aspects of Evolutionary Psychology, and Computers in the Arts & Sciences. He has also conducted numerous in-service teacher-training workshops for secondary school science educators in the areas of evolution, paleontology and the use of computer programs that model dynamic processes in biology to teach evolution and ecology to middle school and high school students.

    Mr. Bragin is an award-winning producer of print, radio, film and exhibition design whose work deals with high technology and cultural history, including integrated media presentations in new computational methods and devices used in high-speed computer-aided design, computer graphics, artificial intelligence and artificial life. His film and cultural writing has been published in journals in the United States and Europe, including Film Culture, Film Quarterly, Positif, and Film Society Review (for which was also Managing Editor for a short time); and in anthologies from several American publishers including Dutton Press, the New American Library, and Rand McNally. In the early 1980s he was co-founder of the UCLA Extension Certificate Program in Film and Television Production. He was Consulting Coordinator for the Program until 1997 and originated and taught over a dozen different courses in producing, directing, and editing fiction and documentary films, as well as in film history and aesthetics.

email: jbragin-at-alumni-dot-ucla-dot-edu