John N. Warfield is University Professor and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences (IASIS) at George Mason University (GMU), a state university, in Fairfax, Virginia. IASIS is a part of The Institute of Public Policy (TIPP) at GMU.

He received the A.B. degree, the B. S. in Electrical Engineering, and the M. S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1948, 1948, and 1949, respectively. He received the Ph. D. degree from Purdue University (West Lafayette) in 1952, majoring in electronic communications.

He has 39 years of university faculty service, of which the past 13 years have been at GMU. He has spent 21 years as a faculty member in Virginia. Throughout that time he had the designation "eminent scholar" in the Virginia system. He has about 10 years of industrial experience: Director of Research, Wilcox Electric Company (1965-66); Senior Research Leader, Battelle Memorial Institute (1968-74); Senior Manager, Burroughs Corporation, (1983-84). This experience included research of both theoretical and experimental nature, electronic development and reliability testing of navigational equipment for jet aircraft, and management experience in overseeing research projects and industry-university contracts.

He served as elected President of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and is a Life Fellow of that organization. He served as elected President of the Society for General Systems Research (later renamed the International Society of Systems Sciences). He served 9 years as founding editor of Systems Research and 4 years as editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

He is the author of 2 U. S. patents on electronic equipment, and is the inventor of Interpretive Structural Modeling, Interactive Management, and Generic Design Science. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Design and Process Science.

He is sole author of four books, co-author of another book, and co-translator of a classic German work on communication networks. He is author or co-author of over 100 papers. He is in demand as a speaker and collaborator outside the United States where his research contributions are well-known. He has presented his work on complexity in ten nations, and has taught one-week short courses in five of them.

His primary activities in the past few years have involved preparing two books for publication in 1994, authoring papers, presenting papers at conferences, teaching short courses, and serving as an information resource or an active participant in working with individuals who are seriously dedicated to improving quality, effectiveness, efficiency, communication, and organizational cultures in their various organizations. He is presently preparing two book manuscripts titled: Essays on Complexity (of which this document is a part) and The Work Program of Complexity: From Origins to Outcomes. Biographical sketches of Warfield can be found in American Men and Women of Science, Who's Who in Engineering, Who's Who in Frontier Science and Technology, and Who's Who in America.