Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Luís M. A. Bettencourt is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a former Senior Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  He obtained his PhD from Imperial College, University of London, in 1996 for work on critical phenomena in the early Universe, and associated mathematical techniques of Statistical Physics, Field Theory and Non-linear Dynamics. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, as a Director’s Fellow in the Theoretical Division at LANL, and at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. In 2000 he was awarded the distinguished Slansky Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory for excellence in interdisciplinary research.  Luís carries research in the structure and dynamics of complex systems, with an emphasis on dynamical problems in biology and society. Currently he works on real time epidemiological estimation, information processing in complex systems, innovation in science and technology and urban organization and dynamics. He is a member of advisory committees for international conferences and referees for journals in physics, mathematics, computer science, computational biology, urban studies and for international fellowship programs. He is the Principal Investigator of the Synthetic Cognition team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is pursuing new science and technology for image and video processing inspired by biological insights. He is also a consultant for the Office Science and Technology Information of the US Department of Energy on the subject of Scientific and Technological Innovation and Discovery