Manfred Laubichler
External Professor
Manfred D. Laubichler is President's Professor of Theoretical Biology and History of Biology, Director of the School of Complex Adaptive Systems in the College of Global Futures and of the Global Biosocial Complexity Initiative and a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University. His work focuses on evolutionary novelties from genomes to knowledge systems, the structure of evolutionary theory and the evolution of knowledge. His undergraduate training was in zoology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna (Austria) and his graduate training was in biology at Yale and in History/History of Science at Princeton. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, external faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a former fellow of the WIssenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Vice Chair of the Global Climate Forum.
Primary Institution: Arizona State University
Role/Title: President's Professor and Director
Topics of Interest: Biology - Economics - Education - Evolution - History - Scaling - Science of Science - Social Science - Strategy/Decision Making
How SFI changes your mind: more or less daily through intellectual stimulation only SFI can provide
When and how you first got involved with SFI: In the mid 1990s when first visiting Walter Fontana
Favorite Book: Fiction: Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (in the original language); Science: Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos and Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species; Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations and Ernst Cassierer, Philosophie der symbolischen Form