Jordan Kemp
Program Postdoctoral Fellow starting at SFI February 2026
At SFI, Jordan will be a Program Postdoctoral Fellow working with Professor David Krakauer, Professor Chris Kempes, and Professor Cris Moore.
Growth and change are defining features of modern societies. Patterns in diverse urban growth data hold insights on how urban environments are changing over time, and how populations adapt in response.
Jordan's research in Multiscale Growth has focused on applying concepts from biophysics and population ecology to leverage the full diversity and richness of growth data as opposed to hiding it with averages. By studying growth as an adaptive process that can be described across scales of organization, much like how organisms can adapt as individuals or as species, Jordan hopes to improve the economic and urban sociological toolkit for studying how human systems respond to emerging challenges.
He works under the Emergent Engineering paradigm, where he is involved with working to detect and understand systemic changes in social adaptive systems. The broader goal is to design and engineer mechanisms that help human systems coordinate in response to sudden changes in our environment, such as job-loss due to AI automation, or social disruption due to rapid climate change. In building frameworks from the bottom-up that connect human decisions and information processing to macroscopic processes, Jordan looks to improve how we identify and respond to compositional changes in places, the emergence of inequality, and barriers to social mobility.
Jordan holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago, where he studied models of adaptive growth. He holds a masters in Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics from the University of Chicago, and a bachelors in Physics from Tufts University. Before arriving at the Santa Fe Institute, Jordan worked at the Institute for New Economic Think at the University of Oxford, where he studied agent based models.