News + Events

Research jams, intercontinental collaborations, and lightning talks — the Postdocs in Complexity Conference is back!

SFI External Professor Srividya Iyer-Biswas presents a Community Lecture at The Lensic on Tuesday, March 26, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. on the laws that govern life, time, and chance.

A new experiment in the "science of sync" show how complex behaviors emerge from a simple network. The work could eventually inspire interventions for heart arrhythmias, or technologies for managing modern infrastructure.

Since the 1970s, community ecologists have relied on two theories to explain the role that species interactions play in Earth's astonishing biological diversity. An SFI working group takes steps to integrate those two theories. 

SFI External Professor Simon DeDeo and co-authors are recipients of the 2018 Cozzarelli Prize, awarded by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for their paper “Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution.” 

When only two things interact, the outcome is usually easily to predict. But what happens when you add a third — or fourth, or fifth, or more — component to the mix? The effects of such higher-order interactions can be difficult to forecast, and are the subject of a working group that meets this week at SFI.

The new book Pertussis: Epidemiology, Immunology, and Evolution, edited by former SFI Omidyar Fellow Samuel Scarpino and Pejman Rohani, is the first major aggregation of interdisciplinary whooping-cough research in decades. 

A small working group at SFI outlines possible new directions for research at the interface between economics, public policy, and philosophy.

New research by External Professor John Pepper offers an intriguing theory for how cancer evolves in people with obesity, diabetes, and chronic inflammation: By providing an over-abundance of energy to cells, these diseases might super-charge their growth and cause them to become cancerous.

New SFI research explores the unintended consequences of removing aboriginal people from their lands, with big implications for a more sustainable future.

The Santa Fe Institute again has ranked among the world's top science and technology and transdisciplinary think tanks.

A working group meeting February 4-6 begins to develop a generalizable theory about the role of information in group conflict.

A working group meets to identify the mechanims that drive different species to make different social choices — band together or go it solo — during times of food shortage.

A working group meets to explore the complex dynamics between plants and animals, predators and prey, and how changes in those interactions can lead to irreversible transitions in ecological communities.

Danielle Bassett presented an SFI Community Lecture on networks and how we, as networks, use network science to think about ourselves at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on February 19.

A major new report takes a complex systems perspective on obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. The authors, including External Professor Ross Hammond, identify connected drivers for the three pandemics and make practical recommendations for both policy and bottom-up social change.

New SFI research challenges a popular conception of how machine learning algorithms “think” about certain tasks.

The AIP journal Chaos has announced that “Anatomy of leadership in collective behavior,” co-authored by SFI Omidyar Fellow Joshua Garland, former Omidyar Fellow Andrew Berdahl, and their collaborators, is among the most-downloaded papers of 2018.

Jennifer Dunne, Stefani Crabtree, and colleagues present their ArcheoEcology work in two back-to-back symposia, “How Human Interactions with Biodiversity Shape Socio-Ecological Dynamics in Deep Time” on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 1:30 and 3:30 pm at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, D.C.

One of the first studies to examine how climate is influencing "functional traits" in forest communities on a global scale finds evidence of major changes.