News + Events

SFI’s Board of Trustees has welcomed three new members: Fred Dotzler of De Novo Ventures, Jacques Dubois of Swiss Re America Holding Corp. (retired), and Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital.

In an SFI Community Lecture on May 6, novelist and physicist Alan Lightman offered his perspective on timeless topics such as God, science, the universe, and religious experiences. Watch his talk.

Experts have gathered at SFI this week to explore whether human languages, passed culturally from generation to generation, and genes should be studied as a co-evolutionary process -- and how scientists might begin to do that.

In an article for the Journal of Industrial Ecology, SFI’s Luís Bettencourt and Christa Brelsford take a complex systems perspective on the problem of sustainable development, describing differing scientific approaches to its exploration.

Computer scientists have barely scratched the surface of what higher math might offer their field, so two SFI scientists are hosting a meeting of experts this week to dig a little deeper.

Research by SFI Professor Sid Redner and fellow physicist Baruch Meerson suggests that nature might be relying on large numbers of sperm to solve the "search problem" of fertilization.

Researchers are at SFI this week examining ways to understand synchrony – when seemingly unconnected subpopulations of a species rise and fall in unison.

In a ceremony Wednesday evening in Santa Fe, SFI awarded science teacher Dave Brooks and ten high school seniors the Institute's 2015 High School Prize for Scientific Excellence.

SFI congratulates Katelynn James and Meghan Hill, both graduates of SFI’s Project GUTS program, who have won the 2014-2015 Supercomputing Challenge. 

SFI's 2014 Annual Report is now available online. Here are some of the surprising tidbits you will find between its covers...

The Santa Fe Institute has selected four early-career researchers for its prestigious Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellowship. Meet the new fellows here.

A meeting at SFI this week aims to get macrohistorians' heads around all the data available today about past human societies in hopes of gaining a common framework useful to all.

What happens when an award-winning author is asked to write a mission statement…and then read it on camera? Watch the video.

SFI congratulates External Professor Matthew Jackson on his election this week to the National Academy of Sciences.

Most new patents are combinations of existing ideas and pretty much always have been, even as the stream of fundamentally new core technologies has slowed, according to a new study led by SFI researchers.

Dispersal and adaptation are two fundamental evolutionary strategies available to species given an environment. Generalists, like dandelions, send their offspring far and wide. Specialists, like alpine flowers, adapt to the conditions of a particular place. 

A new study confirms quantitatively that partisan disagreements in the U.S. Congress are worsening and that polarization is harmful to policy innovation.

During an April 8 SFI Community Lecture in Santa Fe, statistician Susan Murphy showed how a healthcare decision approach that adapts treatment to each patient over time can improve patient outcomes. Watch the talk here.

With the nation’s power grid under increasing stress by a number of forces, the business of delivering electricity is in need of a rethink, if not an overhaul. A workshop at SFI this week asks what the future grid might look like.

For an innovative insight into using cellphone data to plan energy infrastructure in the developing world, SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Markus Schlӓpfer and his team have won the $5,000 First Prize and the $2,000 Energy Prize in the 2014-15 'Data for Development' Challenge Senegal.