SFI Omidyar Fellow Alumni - Where Are Past Fellows Now ?

Following their appointments at SFI, Omidyar Fellows are achieving significant successes as leaders in the scientific and business communities.

Meet current SFI Omidyar Fellows

Caroline Buckee

Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Harvard University

Caroline Buckee (Omidyar Fellow 2007-2010) merges mathematical simulation with experimentation to understand how pathogens evolve to evade the immune systems of their hosts and how that dynamic results in patterns of infection among human populations. She hopes her studies of the malaria parasite and other diseases will help improve public health policy.
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Elhanan Borenstein

Assistant Professor, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute

Elhanan Borenstein's (Omidyar Fellow 2007-2009) interests lie in the interplay between evolutionary processes and the organization of biological, ecological, and social systems. He wants to identify fundamental, universal, and generic links between the structure of complex systems and their generative dynamics, and to develop methods to draw novel insights from these links.
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Rogier Braakman

Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Department of Earth, Atmospheric, & Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Rogier Braakman (Omidyar Fellow 2010-2013) is interested in how chemical organization evolves in nature. Specifically, he is examining the logic and evolution of early bacterial metabolism and the origin of life, as well as the evolution of chemical organization from cold dark interstellar clouds to complex multicellular organisms and ecosystems, using computational and theoretical methods.
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Aaron Clauset

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute

Aaron Clauset’s (Omidyar Fellow 2006-2010) lab develops new methods to understand the dynamics of complex social and biological networks, global statistical patterns of violence (wars and terrorism), social competition, and macroevolutionary processes. He frequently visits the Institute and lectures during SFI complexity courses and summer schools.
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Nathan Collins

Director, Student Achievement Measurement Systems, Teach for America

(Omidyar Fellow 2008-2011)
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Simon DeDeo

Research Fellow, Santa Fe Institute

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Nathan Eagle

Co-founder and CEO, Jana

Mobile phones are a global phenomenon. Nathan Eagle (Omidyar Fellow 2007-2010) believes they have untapped potential for creating economic opportunity in the developing world. His company Jana has created platforms for people in developing countries to earn pay and airtime by participating in marketing research and other socially useful tasks on their mobile phones. Eagle made Wired magazine’s 2012 “Smart List” of 50 people who will change the world.

Tanya Elliott

Associate Lecturer, School of Science, Curtin University of Technology

(Omidyar Fellow 2009-2010)

Laura Fortunato

University Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford; and Tutorial Fellow in Evolutionary Anthropology, Magdalen College, University of Oxford

Laura Fortunato (Omidyar Fellow 2010-2012) is investigating the evolution of human social organization, focusing on the social norms regulating kinship and marriage -- including why societies differ with respect to these norms and how this variation came about. Her research combines theoretical and statistical methods used in the study of non-human social systems with theory and data from the historical and social sciences, including anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology.
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Miguel Fuentes

Director of Research, School of Government, Research Center on Social Complexity, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile

Miguel Fuentes (Omidyar Fellow 2006-2009) seeks to understand the behavior of complex systems from a conceptual/fundamental point of view, focusing on anomalies that often are important ingredients of new features. He is developing a research program that focuses on emergent phenomena and stochastic and nonlinear dynamics applied to the appearance of innovations in ecologically diversified environments.

Daniel Hruschka

Assistant Professor, School of Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University

Dan Hruschka (Omidyar Fellow 2006-2009) asks how we humans make our culture and how culture makes us human. He approaches these questions as an anthropologist, but he borrows from across the social sciences. Much of his work focuses on developing new ways of framing and testing hypotheses about two specific questions: how humans stay healthy and how humans cooperate.

Anne Kandler

Assistant Professor, School of Mathematical Sciences, City University London

Languages are dying at an alarming rate, and with them people’s cultural identities. Anne Kandler (Omidyar Fellow 2011-2012) believes changes in the way people use languages offer a way to track cultural shifts. She is working on simulations that examine such shifts, using the endangered Scottish Gaelic language as a case study.
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Willemien Kets

Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

(Omidyar Fellow 2008-2010)

James O'Dwyer

Assistant Professor, Department of Plant Biology, School of Integrative Biology, University of Illinois

James O'Dwyer's (Omidyar Fellow 2010-2013) research focus is in theoretical ecology. He seeks to understand why seemingly universal patterns of diversity are found in many different ecological systems. From this research, he believes, light may be shed on practical issues such as the loss of biodiversity due to climate change.
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Scott Ortman

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder

Scott Ortman (Omidyar Fellow 2011-2013) is an anthropologist by training interested in modeling of coupled natural and human systems over long periods, especially in the U.S. Southwest; the integration of historical linguistics, human biology, archaeology, and oral tradition to better-understand the histories of non-literate societies; applications of concepts and methods from cognitive linguistics in historical linguistics and archaeology; and the role of political processes in the evolution of human diversity.
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Charles Perreault

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri - Columbia

Charles Perreault (Omidyar Fellow 2011-2013) brings together tools from archaeology, biology, and mathematics to pursue a deeper understanding of cultural evolution through the use of theoretical models and cross-cultural comparisons. As part of this work, he compares the changes brought by evolutionary forces on both cultural and biological phenomenon.
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Jessika Trancik

Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering Systems, MIT
External Professor, Santa Fe Institute

Jessika Trancik (Omidyar Fellow 2005-2009) wants to understand and improve the complex process that leads to the widespread use of new energy technologies, especially solar energy and solar energy storage technologies. Her group evaluates the performance of new approaches and analyzes how a technology’s performance relates to its design and the context in which it operates, using results to improve the design process.
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Jeremy Van Cleve

Postdoctoral Fellow, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

(Omidyar Fellow 2009-2012)

Sander van Doorn

Assistant Professor, Behavioral Zoology, University of Zurich

(Omidyar Fellow 2006-2009)

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