News + Events

The 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 over 70 institutions around the globe.

This year, nine new researchers join SFI’s external faculty. 

Does the universe follow patterns, or do we humans just see them wherever we look? In a new paper for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Tyler Millhouse proposes a criterion evaluating just how real a pattern is likely to be. 

If chemical reactions can be “programmed” like other types of computing machines, they might be exploited for applications in many areas, including intelligent drug delivery, neural networks, or even artificial cells, write SFI External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and Marta Dueñas-Díez in a review article for Frontiers in Chemistry.

On September 1, SFI will launch a new “NEH institute,” Foundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics, to introduce early-career humanities scholars to new ways of studying culture with a wide range of computational tools.

A team of economists and scientists have published a new study illustrating how tools from ecology can help us better understand financial markets.

Complexity Explorer unveils a brand-new course on the many faces of computational complexity, with SFI Professor Cris Moore. The content is appropriate for learners from any background (and no mathematical heavy lifting required).

In a new perspective piece in Nature, SFI researchers and their collaborators argue that social scientists can gather highly accurate information about social trends and groups by asking about a person’s social circle rather than interrogating their own individual beliefs.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, incoming SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and former SFI external faculty member Steve Strogatz report using temporal network models to show that allowing connection patterns to change over time makes it possible to synchronize a system more efficiently.

A team of researchers that includes SFI's Albert Kao and Mirta Galesic says that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline,” just like medicine, conservation, and climate science, according to a new perspective piece published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new paper in the journal Cognition examines the visual complexity of written language and how that complexity has evolved.

The first meeting of the Junior Women’s Caucus in Stochastic Thermodynamics aims to give participants the opportunities many early-career researchers find most helpful, such as networking, journal-reading, tutorials, and access to senior academics in the field.

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.

A new study by ecologist and SFI External Professor André de Roos* shows that differences between juveniles and adults of the same species are crucial for the stability of complex ecological communities.

New research published in Nature provides a powerful yet surprisingly simple way to determine the number of visitors to any location in a city. 

In groundbreaking work, a team led by SFI Professor Chris Kempes has developed a new ecological biosignature that could help scientists detect life in vastly different environments. Their work appears as part of a special issue of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology collected in honor of renowned mathematical biologist James D. Murray.

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.

In a commentary this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, SFI colleagues Simon DeDeo and Elizabeth Hobson* discuss the science of social hierarchy — what rank is, what it does, and where it comes from.

Almost 900 confirmed participants joined “WOST II” — the second annual workshop that focuses on stochastic thermodynamics and its application to many issues involving complex systems. 

In an analysis published in the journal PLOS One, alumni of the iconic Complex Systems Summer School took a close look at collaboration among a total of 823 participants who attended summer schools from 2005 to 2019.