A Message from SFI Vice President for Science
I’m sitting in my office on January 9, 2026, looking out at snow on the ground and trees and mountains, more snow coming down, lots of excellent snow, finally! After a delayed start to winter, it has arrived and hopefully will stick with us for several months. Meanwhile, resident researchers have gone full immersion into Complexity Postdoc Fellowship interviews, this week and next. This is always a stimulating way to start a new year, as it acts as a mini symposium showcasing diverse, cutting-edge research by eight early-career scholars. We will decide on fellowship offers late next week.
We also have our first meeting of 2026 this week. Manfred Laubichler and colleagues from ASU are hosting a working group on “Navigating the Space of Collective Transitions in Biology and Society” (Jan. 7-9). There are three working groups approved for February: “Evolutionary Consequences of Energetic Costs of Intelligence” (David Wolpert, Van Savage, Feb. 16-20); “Converging Technologies, Diverging Institutions: Bridging Governance for the Grid and the Grid’s Edge” (Seth Blumsack, Lune Kiesling, Feb. 19-20); and “Foundations of Machine Learning" (Feb. 26-27, Cris Moore). March also has three meetings on the books. March 2-4, Katrin Schmelz and Sam Bowles host a working group on “The Political Economy of Sustainable Liberal Democracy.” Later in March, two working groups explore intelligence: “Building Diverse Intelligences Through Compositionality and Mechanism Design” (Jacob Foster, Melanie Mitchell, March 19-20) and “The Nature of Intelligence: Cognitive Science Perspective on AGI” (John Krakauer, Melanie Mitchell, March 31-April 2).
There is plenty of time and space for meetings beyond March. If you have ideas or need forms, please email sfiscience@santafe.edu, which goes to my team and me. Also, if you are interested in summer visits, please get your requests to sfiscience by the end of March to ensure office space.
Our first colloquium of the year on Feb. 3 features Jenna Bednar on “The ‘Double Security’ of Democracy: Federalism’s Effect on Democratic Robustness.” The second follows on March 10, when Peter Turchin speaks on “The Great Holocene Transformation: Cultural Macroevolution of Social Scale and Complexity.” You can attend these by Zoom if you aren’t here in person.
Finally, SFI is hosting a workshop on April 7-8, 2026, for early-career scholars led by Karen Willcox on “Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences: An Academic and Research Center.” Rising Stars is an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs who are interested in pursuing academic and research careers. Originally launched at MIT in 2012, Rising Stars events have been hosted in many different fields at institutions across the world. This workshop, the 7th, is supported by UT Austin's Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, the Santa Fe Institute, and three national labs (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia). Nominations are due Jan 30, 2026, and require a letter of nomination and the nominee's two-page resume. Find more information, including the nomination link, at https://risingstars.oden.utexas.edu.
Cheers, Jennifer