In 2022, SFI donor Hank Schuyler launched an innovative fund that supports exploratory, boundary-breaking science among SFI’s postdoctoral fellows. Honoring Hank’s late wife, the Lou Schuyler Seed Grant Fund offers up to $15,000 per project to SFI’s early-career fellows. Ten SFI postdocs have held these grants over the last four years, and now SFI’s external faculty are reviewing applications for the next round of grantees. Here, we celebrate the work of a few current and recent grant holders, who are putting these funds to uses as varied as they are inventive.
Complexity and EPE Postdoctoral Fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker is using her 2025 Lou Schuyler Grant to study why some societies are more tolerant of religious minorities than others. It’s often assumed that a certain liberal mindset is necessary for pluralism, but she suspects that political and economic forces might also be at play.
To find out, Doten-Snitker is tabulating characteristics of cities in the Holy Roman Empire between about the years 1000 and 1700 C.E., when Jews were migrating out of the Mediterranean and settling in western Europe. She hopes to find trends that suggest why certain cities welcomed Jews while others did not — findings that could help foster diverse societies today.
Without the Lou Schuyler Grant, “it would have been very difficult to find funding for this work” because it falls between the lines of history and sociology, says Doten-Snitker.
Complexity Fellow Anna Clemencia Guerrero is using her 2025 grant to research how social norms shape biologists’ methods for generating image data, including photomicrographs, or magnified images taken with the help of microscopes. Behind each image is a multitude of choices, from which microscope to use to the settings on the microscope to the specific organism the scientist chooses to represent. Scientists tend to adjust those choices to conform with others in their fields, sometimes unwittingly. “Are they making good choices?” Guerrero asks.
The Lou Schuyler Grant allowed Guerrero to visit philosophers who analyze images qualitatively and historians who analyze text quantitatively so that she could learn their techniques and combine the two. Those in-person visits were “far more impactful than I could have imagined,” she says. “I could tell that my hosts really, really appreciated that I’d come in person.” Because she’s developed warm interpersonal relationships with other researchers, she expects to collaborate with them throughout her career.
Complexity Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang also used the Lou Schuyler Grant to work with pictures, but in his case, those pictures represent how well artificial intelligence (AI) models represent reality. “As humans, we’re limited to visualizing information in only two or three dimensions,” says Zhang, who was among the first grant recipients in 2022. But AI models draw on thousands upon thousands of data points. He and his collaborators created a tool that allows researchers to view the different ways AI can manipulate multitudinous data and how those various arrangements relate to real life.
Some of the visuals resemble sinusoidal lines, with the minima representing well-constructed models and the maxima representing how different those models are from each other. Others look like trees, with each branch representing a different way of arriving at an accurate model.
Meanwhile, Complexity Fellow Marina Dubova is using her 2025 Lou Schuyler Grant to study the role of analogies in science. Whether they’re thinking of atoms as plum pudding or cultural evolution as radiowaves, all scientists have tricks for visualizing the phenomena that they study. “But we don’t really know how analogies influence scientific reasoning or what kinds of analogies are most useful,” Dubova says.
To find out, Dubova and her collaborator, Qiawen Liu from Princeton University, prompt scientists to relate a random thing — New York City, pansies, or a yoga pose, for example — to something they study, then sees what kinds of theories and ideas that relationship inspires. “Some people generate a lot of cool ideas!” she says. The scientists she surveys seem to agree — they often rank these ideas as among their most novel.
The Lou Schuyler Grant allowed Dubova to pay study participants and funded Liu to visit her at SFI — work that would have been much harder without that support, she says.
In addition to supporting research projects that would have been challenging to fund through traditional sources, the Lou Schuyler Grant offers SFI postdoctoral fellows the chance to practice grant writing in a low-stakes setting. “Many postdocs end their fellowships without ever having written a formal grant,” says Robin Lewis, SFI’s Director of Sponsored Research Services, “but it’s a critical skill for a researcher.”