Santa Fe Institute

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Max Jerdee Jerdee focuses on building interpretable, unbiased methods for analyzing network data. Using tools such as Bayesian inference and related probabilistic approaches, he develops models that identify net...

SFI welcomes complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Max Jerdee

Jerdee focuses on building unbiased methods for analyzing network data. Using tools such as Bayesian inference and related probabilistic approaches, he develops models that identify network structures while rigorously quantifying uncertainty.

How life begins and where it might happen again A recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of the biggest mysteries in science: how life first began. Instead of trying to replay Earth’s exact history, the issue’s authors lo...

A new special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of science’s biggest questions: how life begins.

Rather than retracing Earth’s history, the authors look for the universal conditions that could make life possible anywhere, approaching the question from many fields and angles.

If you missed any of the 2025 SFI Community Lectures, remember you can stream them on our YouTube channel.

The 2025 series covered diverse topics, ranging from computation and artificial intelligence to molecular biology, history, philosophy, and cognitive science.

www.youtube.com/@SFIScience/...

For undergraduates curious about complex systems research, applications are now open for the 2026 Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) program — a fully funded, 10-week summer research experience at the Santa Fe Institute.

Apply by Jan. 14, 2026: santafe.edu/ucr

Essay: 2018 summer undergraduate researcher reflects on the impact of SFI experience Sahana Subramanyam was a participant in SFI's 2018 summer Research Experience for Undergraduates — now called the Undergraduate Complexity Research program. In this essay, she reflects on how the expe...

At SFI, Sahana Subramanyam found a place where ideas moved freely between disciplines and mentors encouraged exploration. Her experience in the Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) program helped shape her path to a Ph.D. at Stanford and a research career on social inequality. Read her essay:

Apply now for SFI’s 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship (June 9–July 8). Each year, two accomplished journalists join our summer school program for a deep dive into complexity science. Stipend, housing, and travel covered.

Applications open until Feb. 4, 2026.

Apply: www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

The latest issue of SFI's monthly e-newsletter is now available.
Catch up on recent research, events, and news from the Santa Fe Institute, and sign up to get the next edition in your inbox.

Read it here: mailchi.mp/santafe/sfi-...

SFI Resident Professor Sam Bowles has co-authored a new book of problem sets and solutions based on the new microeconomics, with applications to inequality, climate change, and other pressing issues in today’s world. Available now.

SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu Artificial-intelligence systems have made remarkable progress in recent years, but they still struggle with the kind of flexible, relational reasoning that comes naturally to humans. Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu studies how to bridge that gap.

SFI welcomes Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu.

Artificial-intelligence systems have made remarkable progress in recent years, but they still struggle with the kind of flexible, relational reasoning that comes naturally to humans. Fu studies how to bridge that gap.

Agent-based models move into the economic mainstream In the 1980s and ’90s, SFI played laboratory to a promising new method known as agent-based modeling. In ensuing decades, agent-based models (ABMs) proliferated across many fields, including economics...

What if one model could realistically predict the economy of an entire country? The entire world? A month-long working group, co-organized by SFI External Professor @doynefarmer.bsky.social, made the case that agent-based models may bring this vision to life:

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison builds mathematical tools to quantify and compare biological variation. Her work draws on ecology, population genetics, and information theory to study th...

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison.

@maikemorrison.bsky.social develops mathematical tools to quantify biological variation. She draws on ecology, population genetics, and information theory to study population structure, diversity, and stability.

Melanie Mitchell receives award for science communication SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Th...

Congratulations to SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell (@melaniemitchell.bsky.social), a winner of the 2025 National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. Mitchell is recognized for her writing and podcasts on AI and how we think about intelligence.

Why context matters in decision-making Why do people make short-term decisions that may not be in their long-term interest? An October 22-25 working group takes stock of a new body of evidence from experiments and observations to explore d...

Do people always act in their best interest? A new working group meeting explores how context shapes people's decisions—and how seemingly irrational choices are rational in certain contexts. These insights could one day help create policies that enable better decision-making.

YouTube video by Santa Fe Institute Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an Al as Smart as a 4-Year-Old?

Catch up on our most recent Community Lecture: “Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an AI as Smart as a 4-Year-Old?” with Alison Gopnik.

This was the last of six community lectures for 2025, and all are available to watch on SFI’s YouTube channel.

Watch here:

Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an Al as Smart as a 4-Year-Old? There is no such thing as general intelligence — artificial or natural — argues Alison Gopnik. Instead, there are multiple intelligences, each with its own trade-offs. Three different types of cogniti...

Tomorrow: the final event in SFI’s 2025 Community Lecture Series!

Join us for Alison Gopnik's lecture, “Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an AI as Smart as a 4-Year-Old?” —  7:30 pm at The Lensic.

Free tickets: lensic.org/events
Livestream: youtube.com/@SFIScience

In this SFI Seminar, biographer Alec Nevala-Lee explores the life of physicist and Nobel laureate Luis W. Alvarez, whose work spanned the Manhattan Project, investigating the JFK assassination, and developing the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction.

youtu.be/F4KGgtxNF58

SFI's Postdocs in Complexity Global Conference brings together early-career researchers from around the world. Held September 16–19, this year’s meeting drew 53 scholars for four days of collaboration, networking, and advancing research projects.

www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

Global markets are complex systems, shaped by feedback loops, shocks, and adaptive behavior, rarely following textbook rules. A special issue on complexity economics in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization explores how this approach offers tools for today’s challenges.

santafe.edu/news

Stochastic modeling provides new ways to tackle pressing medical problems. In this seminar, Sean Lawley (University of Utah) illustrates this with two examples: using ovarian tissue cryopreservation to delay menopause, and analyzing how missed medication doses affect treatment.

youtu.be/ec1jKmPskXI

In this SFI Seminar, Mahesh Bandi (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology) presents an analysis of five years of data from an 80-turbine farm, revealing universal, collective, and nonlinear correlations that shape wind power fluctuations.

youtu.be/i2WumlT3Mm0

Review: Thinking Through Archaeological Complexity Complexity science can help archaeologists understand how the everyday actions of ancient people accumulated into the large-scale patterns we excavate today. In her new book, Thinking Through Arc...

In her new book, Thinking Through Archaeological Complexity, SFI External Professor Stefani Crabtree (Utah State University) shows how tools from complex systems can help archaeologists understand how everyday actions of ancient people accumulated into the large-scale patterns we excavate today.

In this Seminar, Scott Aaronson (University of Texas at Austin) explores the limits of mathematical knowability — from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s uncomputability to the growth of the Busy Beaver function and future possibilities of quantum computing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQC7...

Launched in 2022 by SFI donor Hank Schuyler, the Lou Schuyler Seed Grant Fund supports bold, boundary-breaking research by SFI postdoctoral fellows — projects that bridge disciplines and reflect the fund’s spirit of curiosity and innovation.

www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

Reserve your free tickets to SFI’s next Community Lecture with renowned developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik:

“Transmission Versus Truth: What Will It Take to Make an AI as Smart as a 4-Year-Old?”

October 21, 7:30 pm at The Lensic Performing Arts Center.

Tickets: lensic.org/events/aliso...

In search of the optimal toolkit In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton and colleagues present a new model showing the tradeoffs between the cost and utility of new tools in small-scale societies.

Every society must balance the costs of invention with the benefits of innovation.

In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton and colleagues present a new model showing the tradeoffs between the cost and utility of new tools in small-scale societies.

SFI welcomes Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Jacob Calvert The human brain is remarkably good at detecting patterns in the world around us. We notice behaviors, rhythms, and recurrences, and often build analogies to explain them. But not all of these intuitiv...

SFI welcomes Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow Jacob Calvert.

A mathematician and data scientist, Calvert studies how collective behaviors emerge and recur across physical and biological systems. “I try to see which analogies actually hold up to the microscope of precise mathematics” he says.

Brief: Synthetic self-assembling and self-reproducing cells A paper published in PNAS in May describes work by External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and colleagues to create biochemistry-free self-assembling and reproducing 

SFI External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and colleagues recreated a “primordial pond” in the lab. When energized, it formed micrometer-scale structures that make and replicate their own parts. They note that the behavior they observed could be the essential step that preceded life on Earth.

In August, the AIP Foundation celebrated SFI External Professor France Córdova and announced an Endowed Forum in her honor. Córdova has been an astrophysicist, University president, NASA chief scientist, NSF Director, and, now, President of the Science Philanthropy Alliance. 

www.santafe.edu/news

SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik was named the director of MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) this summer. SSRC combines expertise from engineering, physical sciences, and social sciences to address complex societal challenges related to evolving technology.

santafe.edu/news

SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt and co-author Nicholas Marchio (University of Chicago) use the first complete dataset of more than 415 million buildings in sub-Saharan Africa to map infrastructure deficits across 50 countries.

santafe.edu/news