Santa Fe Institute

Science Steering Committee

The Science Steering Committee reviews and makes recommendations to the President on all faculty appointments, workshops, ongoing research activities, and policy issues which affect how science is conducted at SFI. The SSC consists of a subset of the Resident Faculty, External Faculty and Science Board members.

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Raissa D'Souza

External Professor

Professor, University of California, Davis, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering

Jennifer A. Dunne

Professor, Chair of Faculty and V. P. for Science, Santa Fe Institute

Co-Director, Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab

Walter Fontana

SSC, External Professor

Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Systems Biology

John Geanakoplos

Science Board, External Professor, SSC Chair

James Tobin Professor of Economics, Yale University, Economics

Mimi Koehl

Science Board Co-Chair, SSC

Professor, University of California-Berkeley, Dept. of Integrative Biology

Melanie Mitchell

Science Board, External Professor

Professor, Portland State University, Computer Science

Mercedes Pascual

Science Board, External Professor

Rosemary Grant Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Dan Rockmore

External Professor

Professor, Dartmouth College, Mathematics and Computer Science

Jeremy (Jerry) A. Sabloff †

President

Daniel L. Stein *

Science Board Co-Chair, SSC Ex-officio

Dean of Science and Professor of Physics and Mathematics, New York University, Physics and Mathematics

Charles Stevens

External Professor

Professor and Vincent J. Coates Chair in Molecular Neurobiology, The Salk Institute, Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory

Geoffrey West

Science Board, Science Steering Committee

Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute

Chris Wood †

Vice President, Administration and Director, Business Network

Henry T. Wright

Science Board, External Professor

Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology and Museum of Anthropology

† Ex Officio Member

Raissa D'Souza

External Professor

Professor, University of California, Davis, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering

Raissa D'Souza is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on mathematical models of self-organization, phase transitions and the structure and function of networked systems. Her current interest is developing methods to enhance or delay the onset of phase transitions in random graphs as well as using random graphs to model statistical properties of interacting networks, such as congruence between social networks and technical artifacts in Open Source Software, the interplay of genetic-regulatory and protein-interaction networks in biological systems, and diffusion of ideas and viruses through distinct communities. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT in 1999, was a Postdoc at Bell Labs and then a Postdoc in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research. Her research and publications span the fields of statistical ...

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Jennifer A. Dunne


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Walter Fontana


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John Geanakoplos


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Mimi Koehl


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Melanie Mitchell

Science Board, External Professor

Professor, Portland State University, Computer Science

Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She attended Brown University, where she majored in mathematics and did research in astronomy, and the University of Michigan, where she received a Ph.D. in computer science, Her dissertation, in collaboration with her advisor Douglas Hofstadter, was the development of Copycat, a computer program that makes analogies. She has held faculty or professional positions at the University of Michigan, the Santa Fe Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the OGI School of Science and Engineering, and Portland State University. She is the author or editor of five books and over 70 scholarly papers in in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her most recent book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press, is the winner of the ...

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Mercedes Pascual


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Dan Rockmore

External Professor

Professor, Dartmouth College, Mathematics and Computer Science

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Jeremy (Jerry) A. Sabloff


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Daniel L. Stein


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Charles Stevens


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Geoffrey West

Science Board, Science Steering Committee

Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. West served as SFI President from July 2005 through July 2009. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he was the leader, and founder, of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is one of only approximately ten Senior Fellows.

His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This led to the development of realistic quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles. This work, begun at the Institute, has received much attention in both ...

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Chris Wood

Vice President, Administration and Director, Business Network

Chris received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973. Following a postdoctoral appointment at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington DC, he returned to Yale as a faculty member with joint appointments in the Departments of Psychology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery. Chris left Yale in 1989 to lead the Biophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a position he held until becoming the Santa Fe Institute's Vice President in 2005. At Los Alamos, Chris' group was responsible for a wide range of biophysical and physical research, including protein crystallography, quantum information, and human brain imaging. During 2000-2001, Chris served as interim director of the National Foundation for Functional Brain Imaging, a collaboration involving Harvard / Massachusetts General Hospital, University of Minnesota, and a number of academic and research institutions in New Mexico devoted to the development and application of advanced functional imaging techniques to mental disorders. Chris' research ...

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Henry T. Wright

Science Board, External Professor

Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology and Museum of Anthropology

My earliest archaeological research was on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and in the Potomac River valley, recording the remains of prehistoric camp and village sites, as well colonial farms and town sites, and learning to view the past in regional and ecological perspectives. In 1960 I went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate, and was introduced to the anthropological perspectives on the total human achievement. I became fascinated with competing explanations of the evolution of the complex social formations that dominate our planet today. At the University of Chicago, I became interested in the ancient Near East, the planet's earliest civilization, centered in southwest Asia. I did dissertation research in southern Iraq on urban societies of ca. 3000 B.C., completing a doctorate in Anthropology in 1967. I returned to Ann Arbor to join the staff at the Museum of Anthropology as ...

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