The Institute has named four new Omidyar Fellows to join the six current Omidyar Fellows at SFI. The 2010 Omidyar Fellows were selected from more than 200 applicants.
A gift from eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar in 2008 established the Omidyar Fellowship, which brings to SFI early-career scholars from the social, physical, and natural sciences. Omidyar Fellows spend two to three years at SFI as postdoctoral fellows, delving into the major questions facing science and society in a transdisciplinary, collaborative environment.
The 2010 Omidyar Fellows:
Rogier Braakman holds a PhD in chemical physics from Caltech on interstellar chemistry. For the last year he has been an SFI program postdoc working with SFI faculty on the physics of chemical reaction networks and the evolution of autotrophic metabolism. He plans to contribute to the Institute’s studies of the origins of life and the evolution of metabolism, as well as general principles of complex systems.
Anne Kandler holds a PhD in applied mathematics from the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. She currently is a postdoc in the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London. She plans to pursue a modeling framework to study the dynamics of competition between, and associated evolution within, languages under various environmental and social circumstances.
James O’Dwyer holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge. He currently is a postdoc in SFI External Professor Jessica Green’s lab at the University of Oregon. Starting with quantum field theory, he is developing a many-body field theory approach to addressing foundational questions in ecology such as how stochastic processes at the smallest scales feed into large-scale phenomena.
Scott Ortman, director of research at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in southern Colorado, holds a PhD in anthropology from Arizona State University. His research on prehispanic Pueblo societies unifies the traditional subfields of anthropology. At SFI he plans to develop a rigorous way of isolating conceptual imagery, model its effects on group-level patterns in decision-making and behavior, and test the extent to which this imagery exerts recognizable effects at large spatial and temporal scales.
Meet SFI's Omidyar Fellows, learn about or apply for the Fellowship, or support the Omidyar Challenge here.