Santa Fe Institute

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 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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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)

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)

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)