News + Events

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Anna Clemencia Guerrero has received a Whitman Center Fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The fellowship, awarded to 24 researchers from around the world, brings exceptional scientists to MBL for up to 10 weeks of collaboration and access to specialized equipment to pursue projects in biology and ecology.

Traditional models of how culture spreads were designed to describe early civilizations, typically focused on hunter-gatherers and almost always on pre-industrial societies. Today, a myriad of factors — from the internet to our highly diverse societies to astonishing levels of inequality — shape the way cultural norms are transmitted. The old models of cultural evolution simply don’t describe today’s societies. To begin building an updated framework of modern-day cultural transmission, representatives from fields including anthropology, sociology, economics, and cognitive science gathered at SFI from May 14–16 for a working group called “Building a Science of Cultural Evolution for the 21^st Century.”

SFI External Professor Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University) has received a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Science. She shares the award with social psychologists Icek Ajzen, Dolores Albarracín, Anthony Greenwald and Richard Petty for “revolutionizing the way we understand and measure attitudes" with an influence that extends to “psychology, sociology, political science, education, health, economics, and other areas.”

A recent study by SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Andrew Steir and Professor Brandon Ogbunu in NPJ Complexity shows that many U.S. cities diverge from common narratives about political leanings and implicit bias.

Music is a universal language across time, peoples, and geographies, and also fundamental to our human experience, a result of our biological evolution. Despite musicality’s connection to both culture and biology, studies on the evolution of music have rarely brought these topics together. A May 28-30 working group is convening to begin bridging that gap.

In a recent analysis, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and collaborator William Gilpin reported that one foundation model called Chronos could generate predictions of chaotic dynamical systems at least as accurately as models trained on relevant data. The team presented their work at the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, saying the paper represents the first test of zero-shot learning in forecasting chaotic systems.

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.”