News + Events

SFI postdoctoral fellow Kaleda Denton has been recognized by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology as the runner-up for the 2025 John Maynard Smith Prize for outstanding young biologists.

SFI Life Trustee and Chairman Emeritus Bill Miller has been elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. Miller is one of 38 new members elected into the APS this year and is recognized in the category of “the arts, professions, and leaders and public and private affairs.”

SFI External Professor Mason Porter (UCLA) has been named a Fellow of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an interdisciplinary research community that is dedicated to investigating the phenomena, modeling, and behavior of networks.

Five millennia ago, wealth inequality — which had stayed roughly constant for thousands of years — exploded. It has stayed constant, albeit much higher, ever since. One factor was the ox-drawn plow, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Economic Literature. 

Collective action can be highly effective within a community, but can be harder to achieve across communities. People who have friends across communities could help tackle this challenge, finds a recent study in Conservation Letters, in which SFI External Professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and colleagues surveyed residents across 28 Tanzanian fishing villages about participation in beach management activities.

SFI External Professors Alison Gopnik and Scott Page are among 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences, announced this week. Election to NAS recognizes the members’ “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Humans learn by breaking through and plateauing, persisting and resting, and, occasionally, experiencing the blissful flow state. Mastering a skill can take decades, but the learning process unfolds across multiple timescales, from mere moments to days. A new study presents a unified theoretical model, capturing the different timescales of learning.

In April, SFI opened the doors to its newest building, constructed at the Miller Campus in Tesuque. With floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and a covered portal overlooking the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the Gurley Forum will both support existing activities and enable experiments in new modes of doing science. Its first meeting was the 2025 Complexity Science Symposium, held April 25-26, beginning a series of larger science events that haven’t previously been possible on SFI’s campuses.

All organisms carry their parents in their DNA. But it’s become clear that offspring inherit information from many other places, too. Mammals inherit gut microbiomes while in utero, and antibodies through breast milk. Birds, reptiles, and fish inherit environmental information about the particular place they hatch. An SFI working group explores what other forms of non-genetic information show up in biology, why they aren't as salient as genetics, and what can they teach about the way living things cope with uncertain environments.

Scientists usually use a hypergraph model to predict dynamic behaviors. But the opposite problem is interesting, too. What if researchers can observe the dynamics but don’t have access to a reliable model? Yuanzhao Zhang, an SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, has an answer. In a paper published in Nature Communications, Zhang and his collaborators describe a novel algorithm that can infer the structure of a hypergraph using only the observed dynamics.

SFI Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Sam Zhang joins the inaugural class of U.S. Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) Early-Career Research Fellows. The fellowship supports “research projects focused on improving current disciplinary or domain practices in developing science software,” especially explorations of “emerging best practices (or problems) in sustaining” that software.

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has been elected as a 2024 Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior mapped the dependency relationships between workplace skills, identifying a nested structure in many professions, where advanced skills depend on prior mastery of broader skills. This nestedness, they found, has significant implications for wage inequality and career mobility in increasingly complex labor markets.

Aiming to chart a more sustainable path for governing our nation’s grid, representatives spanning physics, law, energy regulation, economics, and even evolutionary dynamics is meeting April 9–11 at SFI for a working group on “Governance Institutions for a Polycentric and Technologically Complex Electric Power Grid.” 

To avoid the unintended consequences of climate policy, we need to better understand how climate policies and people’s values coevolve. A recent working group led by Katrin Schmelz and Sam Bowles met to investigate. 

Over the past three years, C. Brandon Ogbunu has become a familiar face at SFI as an External Professor. In February, he joined SFI as a part-time Resident Professor.

When comparing two objects, people either rely on internal memories of these objects or run their hands and eyes over them to directly perceive their similarity. The latter approach, a shortcut that offloads cognition to the active perceptual operations like eye or hand movements, requires a lower memory burden. In a study published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova and SFI Research Fellow Arseny Moskvichev demonstrate that it is also more effective.

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an interdisciplinary research community dedicated to investigating the phenomena, modeling, and behavior of networks.

In The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality, former SFI External Professor Sander Bais offers a three-volume set that reviews classical physics, dives deeper into quantum mechanics, and explores the underpinnings of complex systems, all in a coffee-table-worthy package. "This remarkable tour de force covers all of physics and much of science in general with elan, insight, and humor, imparting a feeling of awe for the profundity of the laws of the universe," writes SFI External Professor Doyne Farmer. "It encapsulates the wisdom that can only be achieved by a brilliant physicist at the end of a long career, and is a tribute to the mystique and magic of science." 

SFI External Professor Mason A. Porter (UCLA) has received the 2025 George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for “his outstanding exposition of the mathematical sciences to audiences at all levels and interests.”