Miller Distinguished Scholarship

The Miller Distinguished Scholarship is the most prestigious visiting position at the Santa Fe Institute, and appointment is by internal nomination only. The position ranges from a few months to a year and offers a unique environment for highly accomplished, creative thinkers to catalyze transdiscipinary collaboration, synthesize ideas and methods from many disciplines, and enhance, or even define, new fields of inquiry. Miller Scholars both benefit from and contribute to ongoing scholarly research at SFI.

SFI Trustee and former Board Chair Bill Miller, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Legg Mason Capital Management, Inc., underwrites the Miller Scholars program. It is the express purpose of the Miller Scholarship, and a condition of the gift, that Miller Scholars contribute perspectives that are complementary or orthogonal to SFI’s mission. Miller Scholars are selected on the basis of profound contributions to our understanding of society and science, and/or contributions to the generation of culture. Accomplished artists, philosophers, and humanists without traditional quantitative training, in addition to quantitative scientists, are selected.

During their stay at SFI, Miller Scholars are free to devote their time to scholarship on any topic. Miller scholars are encouraged to collaborate with SFI resident faculty and postdoctoral researchers, and make use of the working group- and workshop-convening power of the Institute.

Terms are negotiated with SFI’s Chair of the Faculty and President.

SFI Miller Scholars:

Daniel Dennett, 2010
Philosopher of science, consciousness, and evolutionary theory Daniel Dennett spent five months at SFI beginning in January 2010. His research focuses on philosophy as it relates to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He has written about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool. At Tufts University Dennett is co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy.

Seth Lloyd, 2010- 2011
Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and an SFI external professor, came to SFI in July 2010. His research centers on the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. In his book Programming the Universe he contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves. He is principal investigator at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics and directs MIT’s Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory.

Sam Shepard, 2010-2011
Actor-playwright-director Sam Shepard arrived at the Institute in December 2010. Shepard is author of several plays, short stories, essays, and memoirs. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He has played roles in more than 40 films, most notably his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, which earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1983. He has directed several of his own plays.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 2011-2012 
Novelist and professor of philosophy Rebecca Newberger Goldstein came to the Institute in September 2011. Goldstein is the author of many successful books, including biographical studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996, was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2006. She has also taught at several prestigious universities in New England and New York City.