Santa Fe Institute

Bio

A major research direction to date has been in seeking to understand fundamental questions about the nature of spacetime, for example: why is the universe we experience four dimensional? This often involves analyzing toy models to gain insight into the underlying dynamics of the problem and employs a range of mathematical and physical techniques including graph theory, matrix models, statistical mechanics, probability and quantum field theory. Work in this area necessarily raises deep questions about the relevance of quantum histories to the classical world and the nature of emergence.

Similar conceptual and technical issues (e.g. fractal analysis and diffusion processes) arise in other systems with a large number of interacting degrees of freedom. In particular, I am interested in the types of mathematical structures and processes utilized in language and cognition and how this level of organization is related to neural information processing. Another current focus area is aimed at extending economic reasoning to unravel the relationship between institutions, technologies and human behaviors and values with the ultimate goal of producing a quantitative model of how these entities interact with and result in different levels of human and ecological well-being. This project is informed by ideas from many disciplines including economics, ecology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, archeology, politics, biology and ethics.

I have a passion for education at all levels, believe that since science is an essential part of society it should be both accessible and accountable and feel strongly that the more women there are in science the better integrated it will be. I have a D.Phil. in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford and in between various other adventures have studied physics, mathematics, computer science, neurology, psychology and child development.