News + Events

Citizen opposition to COVID-19 vaccination has emerged across the globe, prompting pushes for mandatory vaccination policies.  But a new study based on evidence from Germany and on a model of the dynamic nature of people’s resistance to COVID-19 vaccination sounds an alarm: mandating vaccination could have a substantial negative impact on voluntary compliance.

COVID-19 hit the world’s cities especially hard, and some of the worst suffering occurred in economically depressed neighborhoods. In Santiago, Chile, for example, low-income people were more likely to contract and die from the disease than residents in other parts of the capital city, according to new research published in the journal Science. 

The rapid spread of the coronavirus around the world is a grim reminder of the importance of inter-governmental cooperation — and the consequences of trying to go it alone. A new paper published in PNAS and co-authored by SFI external professor Matthew Jackson found that infection rates from diseases like COVID-19 can be decreased if nations, states, and cities develop proactive policies that allow them to act fast to contain a crisis.

SFI External Professor Melanie Moses argues, in her recent op-ed for Nautilus, how algorithmic thinking might hold the key to a far more successful rollout.

How to build trust in COVID-19 vaccines: Why people distrust vaccines and how they can be convinced otherwise. 

In their op-ed for Nautilus, SFI External Professor Melanie Moses (University of New Mexico) and her colleague Kathy L. Powers (University of New Mexico), argue that if scientists are to help public health policymakers meet their stated goal of protecting the most vulnerable, they must refine their methods to focus on the complex systems that govern communities that are most at risk.

In an essay for Aeon magazine, SFI Professor Jessica Flack and SFI Davis Professor Melanie Mitchell describe how the COVID-19 pandemic prompts us to revisit the ways that complex systems retain stability in the biological world. By learning from biological systems, we can begin to shore up the vulnerability inherent in the complex systems that undergird human life.

SFI External Professor Ross Hammond and collaborators have developed a new agent-based computer model that helps policy-makers simulate multiple variations for re-opening. It can incorporate critical factors in determining how to contain COVID-19, such as variations in age, contact networks, activity patterns, and likelihood of infection.  

The COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as the first complexity crisis in history, Geoffrey West and David Krakauer write in an article for Nautilus. By capturing the kinds of tradeoffs that lie at the heart of complexity crises, complexity science can help us manage the pandemic’s long-term ramifications.

We must use a modeling approach to COVID-19 data that will yield the least biased inference and prediction.

When thinking about reopening schools, an important factor to consider is the rate of community transmission.

Well-mixed models do not protect the vulnerable in segregated societies.

Pandemics rapidly reshape the evolutionary and ecological landscape and have cascading social, economic, and other system-level effects.

The countervailing pressures of economic pain and disease containment are keeping the COVID-19 pandemic at a noisy equilibrium.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to out-evolve the virus by evolving our own scientific ingenuity and social practices.

To present expert perspectives on the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic, SFI has launched an online series called “Transmission.”

The concept of the extended phenotype provides a way to circumvent Landauer’s bound.

Forecasting ambiguity is inevitable in exponential growth processes that underlie epidemics.

COVID-19 lockdowns provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study wildlife in empty cities. 

Mechanism design can aid the market in meeting extraordinary needs under unusual circumstances.