A Message from SFI Vice President for Science
Greetings from the mountains of Santa Fe. In turbulent times for science and society, SFI’s role as “A place removed from the pressure of received ideas” (Murray Gell-Mann) is more important than ever. SFI continues to be a place of intellectual refuge, reflection, and recharging, as well as a place where inspiration strikes and impact emerges in unexpected ways.
SFI has some excellent news: C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) has joined us as a part-time resident professor after three years on the external faculty. You can find more details in an upcoming Parallax article. I pull one quote: “Disregard for disciplinary boundaries is essential for discovery,” Ogbunu says. “The Santa Fe Institute is so special and important because they lean into that, and don’t run from it.”
In addition, our open faculty search for full-time resident faculty (on five-year terms) closed on March 28; the process of winnowing more than 125 applications begins. Thanks for helping to get the word out. As mentioned before, this is the beginning of a multi-year hiring process that will continue over the next several years.
We have several outstanding new postdoctoral fellows lined up to join us in 2025. Max Jerdee and Maike Morrison will join us in the fall as Complexity Postdoctoral Fellows. We also have new grant-funded postdocs Shuhao Fu and Jordan Scharnhosrt joining later this year or in early 2026. Their information is on our website; I encourage you to peruse their bios and find ways to engage with our stellar current and future postdocs. When at SFI, you will find them taking breaks from research at the ping-pong or foosball tables outside of Pod C.
We have a baker’s dozen of science meetings scheduled (thus far) for April through June, and a very exciting associated development. The new Gurley Forum large lecture hall (thank you SFI Trustee Bill Gurley!) on the Miller Campus will debut as the location of the annual spring Complexity Science Symposium on April 25–26, “The Emergence of Complexity and the Complexity of Emergence” organized by David Krakauer and Melanie Mitchell. David has decided to be the guinea pig for the Forum and is hosting two additional meetings there in Q2: the May 22–23 workshop “Emergent Engineering Technology Summit” and the June 16–18 working group on “Science of History.” The new Forum greatly adds to our capacity and provides the ability to self-host larger meetings such as our annual spring and fall Symposia that we have traditionally held at local hotels or museums.
In addition to those meetings, we have several working groups scheduled for the Cowan Campus on diverse topics that include "Governance Institutions for a Polycentric and Technologically Complex Electric Power Grid" (April 9–11, Lynne Kiesling & Seth Blumsack); "Biological Information and Environmental Uncertainty” (April 30–May 2, Mary O'Connor & Melanie Moses); "Foundations of Adaptive Networks" (May 6–10, Aanj Kumar et al.); “Category, Hierarchy, and Cooperation (May 6-8, Kerice Doten-Snitker); “Towards the Integration of Socio-Cultural and Individual Difference Approaches to Implicit Attitudes” (May 15–16, Andrew Stier & Mahzarin Banaji); “Building a Science of Cultural Evolution for the 21st Century (May 19–21, Paul Smaldino); “Music Evolution: From Biology to Artificial Intelligence” (May 28–30, Marco Buongiorno et al.); and “Stochastic Thermodynamics and Computer Science Theory II” (June 16–20, David Wolpert et al.).
June also brings an influx of early career scholars joining us for our regular in-person education programs: our Undergraduate Complexity Research program, Complex Systems Summer School, and Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science. You can find details on our website. We also look forward to the influx of external faculty and other summer visitors starting in June. We still have space for visitors, especially in July and August — please do send your visit requests to sfiscience@santafe.edu.
Cheers, Jennifer