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External Professor David Wolpert joined SFI's resident faculty on a half-time basis on Monday, September 9, 2013. He also is a member of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Information Sciences Group.

"We are very pleased to have David join us," says SFI Chair of the Faculty Jennifer Dunne. "For the last two years, he has been one of our most active external faculty members. For example, the theme week that he co-organized last summer on 'Combining Information Theory and Game Theory' sought to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of information in a variety of strategic situations."

Wolpert's research extends far beyond the so-called No Free Lunch Theorems he and his collaborator William Macready are perhaps best known for. Over his 24-year career, Wolpert has studied the foundations of physics, problems in statistical inference and machine learning, methods for distributed optimization, and the intersection of information theory, economics, and social science, all topics he continues to study today.

"There’s just too much stunning stuff in all the sciences for me to restrict myself to just one of them," says Wolpert. As a result, he says he has "worked at the junctions of fields that usually don't talk with one another. That's where a lot of the breakthroughs of modern science have been, in my opinion, and where lots of future ones will lie. And those junctions are what SFI is about."

Wolpert left UC Santa Barbara in 1989 with a Ph.D. in physics, having studied neural networks and how best to generalize from the inferences such networks make. He attended one of SFI's first summer schools on complex systems in 1988 and, following a prestigious Director's Fellowship at Los Alamos, came to SFI as a postdoctoral fellow from 1991 to 1996. After 14 years at NASA's Ames Research Center, he returned to Los Alamos in 2010 as an Ulam Distinguished Scholar in the lab's Center for Nonlinear Studies.