News + Events

With the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the Santa Fe Institute has suspended all public events and scientific meetings. Check here for live updates.

SFI's President David Krakauer announces the Institute's suspension of visitor-related programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Event Cancelled In this SFI Community Lecture on March 24, Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life, will guide us through approaches aimed at developing a new theory for understanding life.

Abrupt environmental changes, known as regime shifts, are the subject of new research in which shows how small environmental changes trigger slow evolutionary processes that eventually precipitate collapse.

In a new issue of PLOS One dedicated to the “science of stories," SFI's Mirta Galesic and her fellow guest editors present emerging computational approaches that could add a new dimension to narrative analysis.

NPR’s David Brancaccio is hosting a free, virtual book club around the CORE team's introductory econ textbook.

New work led by SFI researchers reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.

The walls of SFI’s Miller and Cowan campuses were recently adorned with an exhibition by acclaimed visual artist Greg Stimac.

An NSF-funded research project is exploring the effects of network structure on wealth inequality. In February over 40 anthropologists, economists, and others will review their research so far and chart new directions.

For the tenth year running, the Santa Fe Institute has ranked among the world's top science and technology and interdisciplinary think tanks.

A new Scientific Reports paper puts an evolutionary twist on a classic question. Instead of asking why we get cancer, Leonardo Oña of Osnabrück University and Michael Lachmann of the Santa Fe Institute use signaling theory to explore how our bodies have evolved to keep us from getting more cancer.  

In this SFI Community Lecture, economist Rajiv Sethi shows the depths to which stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

In the few short months since Carrie Cowan arrived at SFI, she’s been immersed in the culture and in uncovering new ways to advance the Institute’s educational mission. But the moments that most stand out to SFI’s new Director for Education are all about the people.

For something as ubiquitous in modern life as electrical power, few of us know much about the rules that govern power production, fees, or transmission. SFI External Professor Seth Blumsack, with colleagues from Boise State University and Duke University, are working to better understand them through a recently funded project called RTOGov (short for RTO Governance). Last fall, they shared what they've learned with the U.S. Congress.

This week at SFI, researchers take a quantitative look at an age-old question: to what extent is human history shaped by impersonal trends, big ideas, and great leaders?

SFI's David Krakauer and Cristopher Moore remember mathematician Reuben Hersh, who passed away January 3, 2020.

In an op-ed for Fast Company, External Professor James Evans (University of Chicago) and his colleagues demonstrate that when organizations and individuals succeed after failure they follow a distinct path.

A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes.