SFI External Professor Sidney Redner will join the Institute's resident faculty next summer, SFI Chair of Faculty Jennifer Dunne announced today. Redner now chairs the Department of Physics at Boston University.

He is expected to join SFI on July 1, 2014.

Redner says he's looking forward to the working style and academic freedom SFI affords, opportunities he says are hard to come by. He first tasted life at SFI during visits in 2004 and 2005, when he was an Ulam Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on opinion formation. 

He hopes to continue work on quantitative social science, but "I couldn’t even predict what I'd be doing six months from now. I’d really like to reinvent myself" at SFI, he says. 

Redner earned an A.B. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1972 before moving to MIT with plans for a career in high-energy experimental physics. Following a few years studying high-energy theory and mathematics, Redner began working on statistical physics, focusing on phase transitions and renormalization theory with advisor H. Eugene Stanley.

After earning his Ph.D. in 1977, Redner spent a year at the University of Toronto before joining BU's physics department in 1978. Over the past three and a half decades, he has worked on a variety of topics related to statistical physics, including polymer physics and the theory of random walks, in addition to more recent work on complex networks and on social dynamics such as voting and opinion formation. He has been chair of BU's physics department since 2011 and joined SFI as an external professor in 1997. He is the author of more than 200 academic papers and book chapters as well as two books on statistical physics. 

"Redner is an outstanding addition to the resident faculty," says Dunne.  "His rigorous and creative approaches to a wide range of research topics complement ongoing work at SFI, and he will add new dimensions to the intellectual and institutional life here."