News + Events

SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow Natalie Grefenstette, who holds a PhD in prebiotic chemistry from University College London and is working with Professor Chris Kempes on a NASA-funded Agnostic Biosignatures project.

SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Mingzhen Lu, a biogeochemist who holds a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University and a BS in geosciences from Peking University.

SFI welcomes Eddie Lee, a Program Postdoctoral Fellow working with SFI President David Krakauer and Professor Jessica Flack in the Collective Computation (C4) Group, who builds on his background in physics to study social phenomena.

SFI welcomes Omidyar Fellow Andrés Ortiz-Muñoz, who holds a BS in mathematics and physics from the University of Texas at El Paso and is completing a PhD in biology at CalTech.

SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow George Cantwell, who is completing his PhD in physics at the University of Michigan and recently tackled one well-known flaw in network modeling that has persisted since the 1930s, and who will be working with SFI Professor Cris Moore.

Research News Briefs highlight new studies from the SFI community published in the last quarter. The following briefs appeared in SFI's Spring 2020 Parallax newsletter. 

Ole Peter's "The ergodicity problem in economics" recieved an Altmetric score over 1,000 in April, 2020, making it the highest-scoring paper in the journal Nature Physics.

COVID-19 is changing fundamentally the way we talk about the economy, SFI's Wendy Carlin and Sam Bowles argue in an op-ed for the Financial Times.

What happens when the instruments we use to make rigorous scientific predictions operate in ways that we cannot comprehend with natural cognition? In a recent essay published in Aeon, SFI President David Krakauer takes a philosophical deep dive into this fascinating and pressing question.

Despite the near-universal assumption of individuality in biology, there is little agreement about what individuals are and few rigorous quantitative methods for their identification. A new approach may solve the problem by defining individuals in terms of informational processes.

In their op-ed for STAT, former SFI postdoctoral fellow Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) and current postdoc Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and Peters Hurst Scholar, argue that if scientists hope to develop better epidemiological models, they must grasp the complex interplay between social behavior and disease.

SFI External Professor Joshua Epstein states the contagion of fear is as significant to the current pandemic as the novel coronavirus itself.

By using transmission to our advantage, we can eliminate coronavirus through citizen-based medicine.

With the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the Santa Fe Institute has suspended all public events and scientific meetings. Check here for live updates.

SFI's President David Krakauer announces the Institute's suspension of visitor-related programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Event Cancelled In this SFI Community Lecture on March 24, Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life, will guide us through approaches aimed at developing a new theory for understanding life.

Abrupt environmental changes, known as regime shifts, are the subject of new research in which shows how small environmental changes trigger slow evolutionary processes that eventually precipitate collapse.

In a new issue of PLOS One dedicated to the “science of stories," SFI's Mirta Galesic and her fellow guest editors present emerging computational approaches that could add a new dimension to narrative analysis.

NPR’s David Brancaccio is hosting a free, virtual book club around the CORE team's introductory econ textbook.

New work led by SFI researchers reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.