SFI Professor David Krakauer has been named the first permanent director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a center for the trandisciplinary study of human health.
SFI Professor Jessica Flack will co-direct (with Krakauer) a Center for Complex Systems and Collective Computation at the university that builds on their work in Santa Fe.
Read a UW-Madison interview with Krakauer (December 1, 2011)
Read the UW-Madison article announcing the move (September 29, 2011)
Krakauer and Flack announced their plans to the SFI community on September 20.
"We both very much view this as an opportunity to expand the great experiment of SFI in breaking down barriers to new knowledge, and bringing to a university and research laboratory setting, the spirit of complexity science," wrote Krakauer in a farewell email to the Institute's scientists and staff.
He added: "The SFI community has instilled in us values and ideas that are fundamental and important enough to transform the academic landscape, and we feel privileged to be a part of both the SFI network and to be helping to shape the nascent innovative vision of the WID at UW-Madison. We shall remain affiliated with SFI and hope that this next step in our lives will help to promote a vision of science centered around curiosity, discovery, and synthesis. We shall miss our many friends, the extraordinary atmosphere of SFI and the mojo of Santa Fe, but we shall remain actively engaged and seek to build bridges between SFI and the WID that will enrich both communities. Thanks to everyone, researchers, trustees, staff and community who have helped to make our lives so enjoyable."
The WID current research focuses include tissue engineering scaffold research, living environments laboratory, systems biology, epigenetics, and optimization. Krakauer plans to expand the institute's portfolio and broaden the set of contributing disciplines.
Read the article in The Daily Cardinal (September 30, 2011)
Watch the SFI Update for more