News + Events

Two recent papers by CU Boulder and SFI co-authors explore the socioeconomic makeup and the educational backgrounds of tenure-track faculty across the U.S. 

This summer, 38 Ph.D. students from the U.S. and Europe gathered in Vienna, Austria, for SFI’s first Complexity-GAINs international summer school to better understand the dynamics of societies, with an eye toward preventing disintegration.

Charles Stevens, a preeminent neurobiologist who revealed fundamental architectures in the brain and whose experimental techniques paved the way for decades of molecular neuroscience, passed away on October 21, 2022, in San Diego, CA. At the time of his passing Stevens, 88, was a distinguished professor emeritus at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute’s Science Board and External Faculty.

A new dataset, WikiArtVectors, aims to make computational data approaches available to art historians and cultural analysts, to help discover and understand patterns of cultural evolution.

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with SFI.

If you think clean energy is expensive, try fossil fuels. A new report in the journal Joule shows that a rapid transition to renewable energy sources by 2050 could save the global economy trillions of dollars compared to both a gradual transition and to no transition at all.

Friendships in childhood influence incomes in adulthood, and may play an important role in stimulating economic mobility, according to research published across two new papers in Nature.

In a new study, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, SFI's Simon DeDeo and Helena Miton describe a new model for understanding the transmission of tacit knowledge – that kind of working knowledge that is passed down with very limited specification. 

SFI External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers will lead a new interdisciplinary Center for Pandemic Decision Science at the University of Texas at Austin, funded by a pilot grant from the National Science Foundation.

How do the regulatory systems of governments change as they grow? Do bigger governments require more or fewer bureaucrats per capita? Are more efficient bureaucracies possible? Program Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse is fascinated by how complex systems, from governments to cells, change over time. 

Research jams are among the highlights of the biannual JSMF–SFI Postdocs in Complexity Conference. This fall, two micro-working groups met in the week leading up to the conference to make progress on conversations they began at the meeting last spring. 

The October 13–14 workshop "Coding the Past: The Challenges and Promise of Large-Scale Cultural Databases" meets to train a group of researchers to use the new online Database of Religious History.

At the crossroads of computer science and computational science, the emerging field of scientific machine learning focuses on harnessing new ideas in machine learning together with predictive physics-based models to solve complex, real-world problems. On October 10–12, a group met to collaborate on new ideas about using scientific machine learning in complex fields.

In biology, hierarchies are everywhere, from Linnaean taxonomy — the system we use to classify living things — to the social organization within a pod of gorillas. Biological hierarchies are often explained by the Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) framework, which holds that evolutionary processes gave rise to life’s hierarchies. But this framework has some missing pieces, Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Pedro Márquez-Zacarías suggests.

Our financial, supply, energy, belief, and political systems are undergoing regime shifts. On October 3, SFI researchers and members of ACtioN and SFI’s Complexity Society met to explore these regime shifts from a complex systems perspective.

Novelist Tom McCarthy has been named a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute for 2022–2025.

SFI Professor Sam Bowles and External Professor Herb Gintis have been selected as 2022 Citation Laureates by Clarivate "for providing evidence and models that broaden our understanding of economic behavior to include not only self-interest but also reciprocity, altruism, and other forms of social cooperation.”

Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination, a new textbook by SFI Professor Samuel Bowles and Simon Halliday, upends the conventional content of economics texts and allows a new, more engaging, way of teaching the subject.

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Muratore, whose research focuses on multiple aspects of the knowledge-generating process from theory and simulation to data analysis to classical oceanographic fieldwork.

This October 22 & 23, SFI will reprise the InterPlanetary Festival. In partnership with SITE Santa Fe, this year’s festival offers an intimate setting with limited seating, and content simulcast to multiple screens in Santa Fe's Railyard Park and streamed online.