Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Simon DeDeo is fascinated by the universe and how it works. As a child his attention was caught by Stephen Hawking’s best-selling book A Brief History of Time. Later, he experimented with discharge tubes in the basement of his high school. After a letter he wrote to the MIT Physics Department caught the attention of a professor, he spent two summers in Cambridge, MA, where he studied diffuse interstellar gas using a rooftop radio dish.

Simon now holds a master’s in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge University, an A.B. in astrophysics from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton. His recent past includes post doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo and at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

As an Omidyar Fellow at SFI, Simon takes advantage of the transdisciplinary environment to extend to biology his research in mathematics and theoretical physics. His research investigates the emergence of collective phenomena in biological systems that allow groups to solve problems better than any of their individual parts. At SFI he combines methods developed to study, on the one hand, "unintelligent" physical phenomena, and on the other hand, engineered systems, in collaboration with researchers examining the development and evolution of animal behavior.