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. 

The concept of the extended phenotype provides a way to circumvent Landauer’s bound.

Forecasting ambiguity is inevitable in exponential growth processes that underlie epidemics.

COVID-19 lockdowns provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study wildlife in empty cities. 

Mechanism design can aid the market in meeting extraordinary needs under unusual circumstances.

Policies for responding to pandemics should be rooted in a scientific understanding of cities. 

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.

Robert McCredie May, OM, the Lord May of Oxford, and a leading figure of theoretical ecology, died on April 28, 2020. Bob, as he was known to his many friends and colleagues, was 84 years old.

R₀ is just an average: the transmission rate varies widely, and outbreaks can be surprisingly large even when the epidemic is subcritical. 

To make good decisions under uncertainty, decision-makers must act creatively to avoid paralysis, while recognizing the possibility of failure.

https://santafe.edu/people/profile/david-krakauerTest kits cannot exponentiate at the same rate as the virus. Unless we ramp up to 500K, the curve will flatten due to artifact.

The archaeological record can teach us much about cultural resilience and how to adapt to exogenous threats.

Exercise is a complex medicine that can make seniors less susceptible to frailty, and thus to COVID-19. To help the medicine go down, we need a systematic approach to improving the one technology that we know keeps people on task.

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.