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.
Ian McKinnon was first introduced to the Santa Fe Institute in 2007 by investors Bill Miller (SFI Life Trustee and Chairman Emeritus) and Michael Mauboussin (SFI Trustee and Chairman Emeritus). SFI’s transdisciplinary approach felt like an immediate fit. “Complexity offers an extraordinary prism to look at phenomena in the world, at emergent behavior, and particularly at markets, which had been the center of my life for so long,” he says. “The fact that all of this cutting-edge, fundamental research was taking place in New Mexico, the state where both my wife, Sonnet, and I were raised, was incredibly meaningful.”
He joined the Board in 2013, became the Board Vice-Chair in 2021, and, with Sonnet, has made multiple large gifts to SFI to support education and to expand fundamental research and core science. They also underwrite the highly popular free Community Lecture series at Santa Fe’s Lensic Performing Arts Center, bringing engaging, accessible talks about complexity science to a wider audience.
McKinnon, who founded Sandia Holdings, LLC, a family investment firm, after he retired from Ziff Brothers Investments, says that engaging with ideas about complexity at SFI influenced his work as an investor in two discrete respects. In the first, pedagogy about power-law distributions has refined his thinking about investments and how different companies grab market shares. In the second, conversations with Cormac McCarthy and David Krakauer about the unconscious mind have helped him embrace the deep work our minds can do when we’re not focused on a problem. “If I’m really worried about something, I’ll think about it before I go to sleep, intentionally tapping into the subconscious,” he says.
As he steps into the role of Board Chair, McKinnon acknowledges the foundation built by those who have held the role before him. “The past two Chairs, Michael Mauboussin and Katherine Collins, did a phenomenal job. It’s a formidable challenge even to maintain pace, but that’s part of what excites me,” he says. “As Vice-Chair, I served side-by-side with Katherine as a partner on many tactical issues. It’s a great way to operate, and it’s how I plan to work with Sam.”
Sam Peters, whose first encounters with SFI began when he was a teenager, has been an active supporter of the Institute for more than 30 years and a member of the Board since 2013.
In the late 1980s, before the Institute had found a permanent home, SFI co-founder George Cowan invited Peters’ Tesuque-based family to the Cristo Rey convent to allay his mother’s concerns about the nascent research organization. A few years later, fresh out of college, Peters heard how SFI had shaped the intellectual journey of investor Bill Miller, who would later become his boss. “It crystallized my interest in investing and powerfully combined it with a complexity framework that has guided my development as an investor ever since,” says Peters. He read Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity — a 23rd birthday gift from his mother — and knew at that point he wanted to be an SFI insider. “I did not think the opportunity would emerge,” he says. “Fortunately, it did.”
Through graduate school, he began to meet other people connected to SFI — Katherine Collins, Michael Mauboussin, and later, Ian McKinnon — who shared an intense interest in complexity. “As a Bayesian statistician, I know that information-rich environments are those that challenge existing prior beliefs, to the degree that they must be updated,” says Peters. “This updating of beliefs is true learning. Nothing has moved or continues to challenge and evolve my beliefs like SFI.”
Peters, now a managing director at ClearBridge Investments, says he has watched SFI “reach escape velocity” and finds it incredibly satisfying to be part of a Board that supports this momentum. “David and the team have brought a level of energy and creativity that I have not observed in any other affiliations,” says Peters. “I couldn’t be more honored to support SFI and my fellow New Mexican and long-time friend, Ian, as Vice-Chair. Ian is an incredible person and teacher, and my goal is to help him further enhance the support the board can provide to David and the SFI team.”
Along with McKinnon and Peters’ election to Chair and Vice-Chair, the Board announced a renewed five-year contract with SFI President David Krakauer. “With that agreement in place, we can focus on other questions, like what new areas of science or geography we might explore, or which thought leaders we want to bring to campus,” says McKinnon.
Krakauer, who is also the William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems, says he is excited to be working with McKinnon and Peters in their new leadership positions.
“I am delighted that Ian and Sam have assumed positions as Chair and Vice Chair. One cannot overstate the synergy that results from working with deep thinkers who are not only friends but colleagues who all share a vision for SFI,” says Krakauer. “An SFI that is highly exploratory, risk-oriented, and rigorous to its very atoms. The Board of Trustees at SFI, like nowhere else I know, is an integral part of the community and very often the most vocal champions of complexity science. And Ian and Sam are exemplary in this regard. I count our whole community as very fortunate.”