A Message from SFI Vice President for Science
The last quarter of 2025 at SFI starts in a new way, with the annual ACtioN and Board of Trustees Symposium happening on the first weekend of October rather than the last, to avoid weather complications common at the transition to November. As a result, participants can enjoy Santa Fe’s leaf peeping show which is in full golden aspen glory in the mountains above SFI. The symposium topic, “Rules of the Game,” will spin out in diverse directions, from quantum mechanics to animal cognition to music, through a dozen talks by SFI-affiliated researchers on October 3rd and 4th at the Gurley Forum on the Miller campus.
As of August 1, we welcomed 11 new external faculty to the extended SFI community. Mirta Galesic, a decade long and highly valued member of the resident faculty decided to stay full-time at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna but will continue to engage with us as an external professor. She and Henrik Olsson have spent the last year setting up a new lab group there as funded by a major ERC grant. She will be missed on campus! As for the other ten, in addition to welcoming Dana Randall and Carl Bergstrom back to the external faculty, we added a very diverse group of outstanding researchers: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Erica Cartmill, Nicholas de Monchaux, Karine Gibbs, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, L. "Maha" Mahadevan, Michael Ralph, and Fernanda Valdovinos. You can find their bios on the SFI website.
The pace of science meetings slows down from here on out. The last of three micro working groups that emerged out of the October 2024 GAINs Complexity School in southern France will meet Oct. 13-17 to discuss “The Other Side of Body Size: A Stochastic Framework for Predicting Ecological Resilience Across Disturbance Gradients.” Concurrently, on Oct. 13-15 former Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow James O’Dwyer will host a working group on “Life History Across Domains.” Later in October, Andrew Stier, Luis Bettencourt, and colleagues will host the working group “Identifying General Socioeconomic and Environmental Factors Affecting Human Decision-Making and Behavior” (Oct. 20-22). Skipping a month, SFI gets busy December 10-12 when two working groups meet, “Towards a Data-Driven Science of Stories” hosted by Sam Zhang, Peter Dodds, and Juniper Lovato, and “NeST: Neuromorphic Stochastic Thermodynamics” hosted by David Wolpert. The final meeting of the year, Dec. 15-19, hosted by Sam Zhang and David Wolpert, will focus on “Understanding the Historical Forces Driving Expansions of Human Rights.”
The application portal for the 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships closed on October 1. The hundreds of applications received will be evaluated in several stages over the next two months, with the decision on invitations to interview in January happening in early December. Thanks to David Wolpert for leading the process last year and this year, and to Hilary Skolnik for providing administrative support. We are also in the process of interviewing for resident faculty and a new “Evolving Worlds Fellowship” opportunity (a one-time 5-year resident term for researchers within ~10 years post-PhD). Chris Kempes, who has taken over chairing the Science Steering Committee from John Miller (thank you John for years of service!), has also taken over leading the interview process. Renee Tursi provides the admin support for that process, thank you. Stay tuned!
Finally, a few talks of note. On October 21, External Professor Alison Gopnik will give a Colloquium and a Community Lecture. For the SFI audience, she will discuss “The Evolution of Human Intelligences: Exploit, Explore, Empower” and for the Santa Fe community that evening she will talk about “Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make and AI as Smart as a 4 Year Old?” The final colloquium of the year is by Elizabeth Hinton (Yale) on Dec. 9. You can join those in-person or remotely.
Cheers, Jennifer