News + Events

External Faculty are central to SFI's identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to more than 70 institutions around the globe. This year, seven new researchers joined SFI's External Faculty.

In this “Ocean Decade,” as declared by the United Nations, we face an unprecedented wealth of data documenting the world's oceans. Gathered with tools from satellites to autonomous robots, what once was an information paucity now has become a glut. An August 12–14 working group gathers an international cohort of BioGeoSCAPES Fellows to propose top priorities for the next era of highly interdisciplinary ocean science. 

In a new paper in SIAM Review, SFI External Professor Mason Porter (UCLA) and his students applied topological data analysis, which gives a set of mathematical tools that can quantify shape and structure in data, to the problem of quantifying voting deserts in LA County, Chicago, Atlanta, Jacksonville, New York City, and Salt Lake City. Using a type of topological data analysis called persistent homology, Porter and his coauthors used estimates of average waiting times and commute times to examine where the voting deserts are located. 

How did life come about on this planet? What forms might it take elsewhere? Assembly Theory provides a framework for understanding these questions, and in her new book, “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence,” SFI External Professor Sara Imari Walker proposes a search for the rules that may govern how life could exist here and elsewhere.

In a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, SFI's Mirta Galesic and Henrik Olsson explore the benefits — and potential pitfalls — of several common analogies used to model belief dynamics. 

SFI External Professor Ole Peters (London Mathematical Laboratory) received the Freedom of the City of London on July 19, 2024. The Freedom is awarded to exemplary individuals whose work has contributed to the vibrancy of the City of London. Peters, a physicist who collaborated with SFI co-founders Murray Gell-Mann and Ken Arrow, was nominated for his contributions to the study of economics.

An SFI working group met July 22–24 to consider the role of contingency in complex adaptive systems beyond biology.

Humans’ complex cultures — our beliefs and biases, traditions and fads — can develop through interactions with each other and with our environments. SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kaleda Denton studies how cultural traits arise and spread, exploring the role of non-genetic processes in human evolution.

SFI’s External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu has been recognized by Yale University with the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research.

Interactive Economics, a new, free platform, uses playful, dynamic lessons to deepen students' understanding of economics in a rapidly evolving world. The project, launched on April 11, was spearheaded by SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi and Homa Zarghamee, colleagues at Barnard College. 

SFI External Faculty Member Constantino Tsallis has been elected to the European Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Getting individuals to act in the best interest of society can be a tricky balancing act, one that often walks a fine line between trying to convince people to act of their own volition, versus passing laws and regulations that make these actions compulsory. A new paper in PNAS Nexus presents a mathematical model and an agent-based model that shows the effectiveness of influencers who convince others to make decisions in the best interest of society.

For a billion years, single-celled eukaryotes ruled the planet. Then around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth — a geologic era when glaciers may have stretched as far as the equator — a new creature burst into existence: the multicellular organism. Why did multicellularity arise? Solving that mystery may help pinpoint life on other planets and explain the vast diversity and complexity seen on Earth today, from sea sponges to redwoods to human society.

SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang is the winner of the 2024 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced on June 11. Since 1988, the PEN/Malamud award has recognized writers who demonstrate “dedication to the craft of the short story and whose stories are exceptionally well-realized.”

Times of crisis often call for strong and rapid action, but in polarized societies, strong top-down policies can backfire. In a paper published on June 17, 2024, in Environmental Research Letters, SFI Applied Complexity Fellow Saverio Perri, SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University), and colleagues present a conceptual model of how these dynamics could play out in efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.

SFI welcomes Anil Ananthaswamy and Adam Becker as our 2024 Complex Systems Summer School Journalism Fellows. Journalism Fellows attend SFI's four-week Complex Systems Summer School, participating fully as students, and spend an additional self-directed week at SFI’s Cowan Campus. Each year, fellows are accomplished journalists with a demonstrated interest in reporting on complexity-related topics.

A a June 10–14 workshop meets to develop a new poll for the Database of Religious History to help researchers interested in quantifying the role of music and ritual in religious practices around the world. 

Most organizations operate under command hierarchies: workers, who know the ground reality, report to managers, who know the big picture. In a recent paper, three researchers use an agent-based model to explore how the performance of hierarchical groups varies with changing environments.

Health-science research could benefit from pairing two unique methods of study, argue SFI External Professor Ross Hammond and Sharin Barkin in a May 15 perspective in PNAS. When used together, traditional trials and computational models “offer powerful synergy,” write the authors.

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) received an honorary doctorate from Yale University during its 2024 commencement ceremony in May. She was recognized for her pioneering work to "establish the role that unconscious processes play in governing human social action."