News + Events

SFI External Professor Mark Newman (University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2026 John von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for his contributions to the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of network science and their application to real-world systems. Newman is specifically recognized for advancing the understanding of structure in complex networks and for developing widely used algorithms to identify and measure that structure.

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG). The annual award celebrates “outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems” by an early-career researcher under the age of 40.

SFI External Professor Santiago Elena has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, joining 62 other fellows in the class of 2026, each selected for their contributions in the field of microbiology.

In October, the International Society for Artificial Life recognized several SFI researchers and co-authors with the ISAL Award for Outstanding Publication of 2024. The award celebrates the paper “Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems,” which was published in Interface Focus last fall.

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Anna Clemencia Guerrero has received a Whitman Center Fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The fellowship, awarded to 24 researchers from around the world, brings exceptional scientists to MBL for up to 10 weeks of collaboration and access to specialized equipment to pursue projects in biology and ecology.

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, Dolores Albarracín, Anthony Greenwald and Richard Petty for “revolutionizing the way we understand and measure attitudes" with an influence that extends to “psychology, sociology, political science, education, health, economics, and other areas.”

SFI postdoctoral fellow Kaleda Denton has been recognized by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology as the runner-up for the 2025 John Maynard Smith Prize for outstanding young biologists.

SFI Life Trustee and Chairman Emeritus Bill Miller has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. Miller is one of 38 new members elected into the APS this year and is recognized in the category of “the arts, professions, and leaders and public and private affairs.”

SFI External Professors Alison Gopnik and Scott Page are among 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences, announced this week. Election to NAS recognizes the members’ “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

SFI External Professor Mason A. Porter (UCLA) has received the 2025 George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for “his outstanding exposition of the mathematical sciences to audiences at all levels and interests.”

SFI External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale University) received a 2024 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

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."

SFI Professor Sam Bowles and External Professor Herb Gintis have been selected as 2022 Citation Laureates by Clarivate "for providing evidence and models that broaden our understanding of economic behavior to include not only self-interest but also reciprocity, altruism, and other forms of social cooperation.”

SFI External Professor Wendy Carlin has been named an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S) the Academy announced on April 28, 2022.

SFI archeologists Stefani Crabtree and Devin White win a prestigious HPC Innovation Excellence Award for their work developing supercomputing methods to study human migration.

SFI researchers cheered this October when the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klauss Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems.”  

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton received Central European University’s 2021 award for “Best Dissertation.” 

Joshua Grochow receives the National Science Foundation's most prestigious grant for junior faculty members, which will fund the next five years of his research.

An SFI-authored paper on “Nonlinear Information Bottleneck” is one of four papers to win the 2021 Entropy Best Paper Awards. 

SFI researchers Dana Randall and Joshua Grochow were recently featured in Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent computation blog.