The Institute has named two longtime SFI-affiliated researchers, Cris Moore and Luis Bettencourt, to its full-time resident faculty.
Luis Bettencourt became an SFI professor on December 1, 2011. He had been an SFI external professor since 2007 and a senior scientist in the Theory Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bettencourt carries out research in the structure and dynamics of complex systems, with an emphasis on dynamical problems in biology and society.
Currently he focuses on real time epidemiological estimation, information processing in complex systems, innovation in science and technology, and urban organization and dynamics. He has been an integral part of the cities and urbanization project with SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West, and is particularly well-known for a 2007 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on scaling relationships in cities.
Cris Moore will become a full-time member of SFI’s resident faculty in May 2012. Moore has been affiliated with SFI since 1992 as a postdoc, research professor, external professor, and as a part-time resident professor since 2007. Currently he is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Moore's work focuses on quantum computation (especially post-quantum cryptography and the possibility of algorithms for graph isomorphism), phase transitions in NP-complete problems, and social networks (in particular, automated techniques for identifying important structural features of large networks). He is co-author of the recent and well received book, co-authored with SFI External Professor Stephan Mertens, The Nature of Computation (Oxford University Press, 2011).