News + Events

In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI External Professor Marcus Hamilton and colleagues present a new model showing the trade-offs between the cost and utility of new tools in small-scale societies.

SFI's Lou Schuyler Seed Grant Fund supports SFI’s early-career fellows' new, exploratory research directions. Since 2022, ten SFI postdocs have held these grants. Here, we celebrate the work of a few current and recent grant holders, who are putting these funds to uses as varied as they are inventive.

The human brain is remarkably good at detecting patterns in the world around us. We notice behaviors, rhythms, and recurrences, and often build analogies to explain them. But not all of these intuitive ideas about nature hold up under mathematical scrutiny. Visiting Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Jacob Calvert is interested in which of those ideas can be made precise.

A paper published in PNAS in May describes work by External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and colleagues to create biochemistry-free self-assembling and reproducing synthetic cells.

In August, the American Institute of Physics and AIP Foundation honored SFI External Professor France Córdova with an evening celebration in downtown Santa Fe.

SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik, a former SFI Omidyar Fellow and current professor at MIT, was named the director of MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) this summer. 

In a paper in Nature, SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt and co-author Nicholas Marchio, both researchers at the University of Chicago, use the first complete dataset of more than 415 million buildings across 50 countries in sub‐Saharan Africa to create an unprecedented approach to urban development, down to each street block.

Since the 1970s, the cost of solar-energy systems has plummeted by over 99 percent. In a recent paper published in PLOS One, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik (MIT) and colleagues identify the innovations in various photovoltaic (PV) components that led to this spectacular decline.

In a recent op-ed in PNAS, SFI External Professor Michael Hochberg and co-author Paul Rainey explore whether deepening interdependence between humans and AI could lead to a new form of evolutionary individuality.

The New New Science, a September 15-18 working group, meets to address what it means to view the humanities as subjects described by — and understood through — mathematical and computational concepts.

On August 12-13 a working group at SFI explored the challenges and opportunities of digital-twin technology — virtual representations of physical objects, designed to exactly mimic its inspiration — not as simple models, but as complex systems that use real-time data to change in all the same ways as its real-world counterpart.

In July, the National Science Foundation announced a $100 million investment in AI research, spread over six Research Institutes. Three SFI researchers will participate as leaders and collaborators in two of these groups.

The use of AI in several aspects of the criminal justice system raises pressing questions about how AI and other technologies use data to make predictions and recommendations, and larger questions about how to safeguard fairness. Two SFI researchers were among the authors of a report for the National Institutes of Justice and a recent opinion in the Communications of the ACM to help inform future guidelines on safe and effective ways to use AI in the criminal justice system.

A new paper, sparked during a 2024 working group held at SFI, argues that the field of microbiology must prioritize interdisciplinary advancement of early-career researchers, who typically receive short contracts, race for publications, and find limited opportunities for learning new methods.

External Faculty are central to SFI's identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to more than 70 institutions around the globe. This year, ten new researchers joined SFI's External Faculty.

On August 19–20, the Santa Fe Institute hosted Collaborative Visions of Power in Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan and the Lowland Maya, a working group that brought together archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and astronomers. Participants explored how two great cultural centers of Mesoamerica — Teotihuacan in central Mexico, and the lowland Maya, spanning parts of southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras — influenced one another across centuries, and how those interactions reshaped ideas of power, time, and even architecture.

Why do some ideas catch fire? An interdisciplinary team of researchers offers a new theory

Applications are open for the 2026 cohort of SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellows, who hold the Omidyar Fellowship. This program supports recent Ph.D. recipients for up to three years while giving them broad freedom to explore their interests.

An SFI working group looking for hidden rules that underpin proteins brings molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, statisticians, machine-learning experts, and more to SFI from August 18–21 to explore how proteins emerged, how they could evolve in the future, and how we might build new ones for medical treatment and beyond.

This spring, the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees elected Ian McKinnon and Sam Peters as Board Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. McKinnon and Peters, who both grew up in New Mexico, have multi-decadal relationships with SFI. Their three-year appointments began on April 29, 2025, following the Board’s bi-annual meeting.