SFI Omidyar Fellows

New Leadership for New Science

The Santa Fe Institute is pleased to introduce its 2013 Omidyar Fellows.

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Following their appointments at SFI, Omidyar Fellows are achieving significant successes as leaders in the scientific and business communities. View past SFI Omidyar Fellows

Overview of the Omidyar Fellowship: Meet the Fellows

Ben Althouse

How fast and how far a disease spreads through human society is determined as much by people's interactions as by a pathogen's evolution. To stop tomorrow's epidemics, we will need to combine the best of biology, epidemiology, economics, and mathematics.

Research goals: Explore how human pathogens’ transmission patterns affect societies and how societal interactions affect pathogen transmission.

Fields: PhD, epidemiology, ScM biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University; BS, mathematics, BS, biochemistry, University of Washington

Ruben Andrist

Quantum computers hold the promise of faster processing but remain prone to errors. If we can learn to reliably manipulate and store quantum information, we can solve much bigger problems than today’s computers can handle.

Research goals: Understand and improve quantum memories by analyzing their error-correction performance using insights from simulations, statistical physics, and quantum information theory.

Fields: PhD, computational physics, statistical mechanics, quantum information processing, ETH Zurich

Evandro Ferrada

Biomolecules are the simplest systems on which evolution acts. If we examine evolutionary forces in this most basic form, we might begin to recognize them in systems whose complexity is today beyond our reach.

Research goals: Using computational methods and mathematical modeling, explore the nature of the evolutionary mechanisms that operate at different levels of organization and the interactions between those levels.

Fields: PhD, evolutionary biology, University of Zurich; biochemistry, Universidad Católica de Chile

Paul Hooper

Human culture and history are shaped by fundamental biological principles. By understanding these, we can make better sense of our past and future as a species.

Research goals: Combine ethnographic data with evolutionary theory to understand the formation, persistence, and collapse of human social networks and institutions.

Fields: PhD and MS, evolutionary anthropology, University of New Mexico; AB, Near Eastern studies, Princeton University

Click to play video featuring Paul Hooper

Paul Hooper on the co-evolution of economics and human sociality

Eric Libby

Multicellular organisms have single-celled ancestors, but the conditions responsible for their transitions are unknown. Examining these shifts can shed light on our own evolutionary history and might guide us as we design organisms to do useful tasks in industry and medicine.

Research goals: Map the routes from unicellularity to primitive multicellularity, with particular focus on life at the in-between stages where organisms might have adopted less conventional forms.

Fields: PhD, quantitative physiology, McGill University; postdoc, mathematical microbial evolution, New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study

Sam Scarpino

The evolution of an infectious disease and its complex transmission patterns are inextricably linked. Mathematical models that focus on this relationship will help us prepare for the next big epidemic.

Research goals: Build and apply new mathematical approaches that connect the evolution and population dynamics of viral diseases to improve our understanding of how infectious diseases spread.

Fields: PhD, integrative biology, The University of Texas at Austin; BSc, biology, Indiana University Bloomington

Following their appointments at SFI, Omidyar Fellows are achieving significant successes as leaders in the scientific and business communities.

View past SFI Omidyar Fellows

Ben Althouse

Omidyar Fellow

In the fourth grade, Ben Althouse read Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and became fascinated with the idea that an organism so small as to require a powerful microscope to view and sophisticated tests to discover could wreak such havoc on individuals and societies. This fascination lead him to study a pre-med curriculum as an undergraduate at the University of Washington. There he fell in love with the beauty of mathematics and happily discovered that he could combine his passions: viruses and mathematics and model the spread of infectious diseases in populations.

Through undergraduate and graduate training, he realized that to understand disease transmission, one must draw from epidemiology, biology, sociology, mathematics, and economics: there are a myriad of happenings that dictate if, how, where, and when a pathogen will spread. Ben has studied mosquito-born viruses in non-human primates in Western Africa, the public choice economics of public health ...

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Ruben Andrist

Omidyar Fellow

Ruben Andrist is surveying the future landscape of quantum computing. A researcher and a programmer, he investigates the stability of various quantum codes by determining how well they can retain information in the presence of external noise. His current research lies at the interface between quantum information theory and statistical mechanics.

The hard optimization problems he studies in statistical physics find wide applicability to a plethora of problems across disciplines far and near. Therefore, gaining a deeper understanding of their physical properties and intriguing dynamics promises fruitful synergies with complex problems found in computer science, biology, economy, as well as sociology. The aim of his research is to employ the analytical methods, numerical approaches and physical insights from his study of statistical-mechanical systems with disorder in multidisciplinary applications. In particular, to investigate the structure, robustness and interactions of networks found in graph theory and machine learning.

Ruben holds a MS ...

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Evandro Ferrada

Omidyar Fellow, 2012-2015

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by everything,” says Evandro Ferrada. This lack of focus was something of a problem. No single field provided him with anything close to what he felt would be a satisfying way to explore the universe.

He went through a period of disquiet, seeking the wisdom of scholars, but the epiphany he hoped for never came. Finally, Evandro faced the deadline his university had set for declaring a field of undergraduate study. He chose biochemistry – “just a nice combination of some of the things I liked,” he says.

From time to time Evandro wondered how life might have been different had he chosen poetry. Or mathematics. Then an astounding thing happened while studying the evolutionary biology. He realized it didn’t matter which discipline he had chosen. “The artistic and scientific frameworks are the same,” he says. “They’re just different ways of looking at the world.” He is convinced that there are patterns of change common to seemingly disparate systems.

He aims to contribute to a unified theory of evolutionary biology, beginning his work at SFI by examining genotype-phenotype maps of macromolecular systems. Eventually he hopes to unravel some of the connections between science and art.

Evandro holds a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Zurich and a professional title in biochemistry from the Universidad Católica de Chile. He attended SFI’s Complex Systems Summer School in Argentina in 2008.

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Paul Hooper

Paul Hooper's research at SFI seeks to understand and explain human social structure.

On the one hand, this means understanding the evolutionary origins of those features of human sociality that stand out among primates and other mammals, such as long-term marriage, extensive parental and grandparental support, and high levels of cooperation between both related and unrelated individuals. On the other hand, it also means understanding variation in social structure across human societies, from mobile hunter-gatherers to complex urban civilizations. His research asks, to what extent can major patterns of variation in societal organization across history be explained by a finite set of basic principles of biology and economics?

To accomplish these goals, Paul combines ethnographic fieldwork in Amazonia with cross-cultural analysis and mathematical modeling. His work at the Institute examines the biological and economic processes underlying the formation of human social networks, as well as the emergence of social inequality, political hierarchy, and leadership.

Paul holds a PhD in evolutionary anthropology from the University of New Mexico, and an AB in near eastern studies from Princeton.

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Eric Libby

Omidyar Fellow

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Sam Scarpino

Omidyar Fellow

Big Data alone can't solve our problems. This deceptively simple principle guides Sam's research and is motivated by two key insights from his dissertation. Sam found that first, data in the absence of testable hypotheses, quantitative theory, and statistical methods is rendered worthless, and second, that the appropriateness of the data for a given question is far more important than the quantity gathered. From these insights, Sam has developed a scientific research framework: to investigate pressing biological questions by integrating mathematical models and data with powerful statistical methods.

Sam's highly collaborative research has focused on a broad range of questions, from the effect of environmental toxins on behavior, genetics, and neural biology in rats to models of spatiotemporal variation in tree density and fruiting phenology in Neotropical forests. However, his primary research interests lie at the interface of population genetics, statistics, operations research, and epidemiology. By integrating ...

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