SFI Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University) has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society. Since the 1970s, his work has been rooted in mathematical theories and models to better understand a range of environmental issues. He has been involved with SFI for more than three decades, joining the SFI Science Board in 1994 and serving as its chair from 2007 to 2010. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Thalia Wheatley on June 23, 7:30 pm at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. For more than a century, neuroscience has viewed intelligence as a property of individual brains. But brains did not evolve in isolation. Humans are an intensely social species whose minds are continuously shaped by other minds. Increasingly, evidence suggests that our most sophisticated cognitive abilities emerge not from solitary brains, but from networks of interacting people. In this lecture, Wheatley will explore conversation as a powerful mechanism for coupling minds — aligning attention, beliefs, emotions, and behavior across individuals. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and network science, she will show how everyday features of human interaction are precision tools that synchronize brains, strengthen social connection, and shape mental health. When: June 23, 2026 | 7:30 pm Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM. Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-beauti… Presented free to the public thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.

In this SFI Seminar, Eric Goles of the University of Adolfo Ibáñez explores fungal automata, a cellular automaton model in which information flows only horizontally or vertically. He shows that despite these directional constraints, fungal sandpile automata can simulate arbitrary Boolean circuits and are computationally universal. Watch Goles’s SFI seminar: youtube.com/watch?v=N_HmfSz8…

SFI External Professor Brian Enquist has received the Ecological Society of America’s Robert H. MacArthur Award, one of the field’s highest honors for mid-career ecologists. The award recognizes Enquist’s work linking functional traits in organisms to the structure and functioning of communities and ecosystems, including research with SFI collaborators that helped advance Metabolic Scaling Theory and predictive, trait-based ecology. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

SFI External Professor Han van der Maas has been named the next director of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).  Van der Maas, a professor of psychological methods at the University of Amsterdam, has been involved with the IAS since its founding in 2016, previously serving as a principal investigator and a member of the management team.  santafe.edu/news-center/news…

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova (@dubova_marina) has received a 2026 Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society and the Glushko-Samuelson Foundation. The prize recognizes recent Ph.D. dissertations for groundbreaking work in cognitive science. Dubova’s dissertation from Indiana University focused on the cognitive mechanisms of discovery, research she is continuing at SFI. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Interest in artificial intelligence is driving a proliferation of research into the nature of intelligence. Researchers at SFI are using it as an occasion to revisit classic problems and to make progress on some frontier questions around complex-adaptive systems.  An SFI working group met March 19–20 to explore these questions. It was the first in-person meeting of leaders in an ongoing project, “Building Diverse Intelligences Through Compositionality and Mechanism Design,” funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The group plans to synthesize their work in position papers outlining formal frameworks for compositionality and mechanism design, offering researchers tools to apply to new systems.  santafe.edu/news-center/news…

In March, SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset (University of Colorado Boulder) received two notable honors: he was elected a 2025 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and named 2026 Distinguished Alumni by the University of New Mexico School of Engineering. Both honors recognize Clauset’s foundational contributions to network science and computational social science, including his work on the structure and dynamics of complex systems. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne has received the 2026 Erdős-Rényi Prize, the top honor for early-career researchers in network science. “This recognition reflects the deeply collaborative nature of complex systems research,” says Hébert-Dufresne. “The most exciting questions in network science happen at the intersections — between disciplines, between theory and application, and between people with very different perspectives.” santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Is the scientific enterprise too risk-averse? SFI Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu joined an Open to Debate event at Johns Hopkins University, alongside other scientists and scholars, to discuss whether today’s incentive structures reward safe, incremental work over bold scientific thinking. Watch the debate: youtube.com/watch?v=AuPz09dp…

In this SFI Seminar, Gianfranco Bertone (@gfbertone) of the University of Amsterdam traces the search for dark matter, beginning with the observations and arguments that made it central to cosmology, to the experiments shaping the next decade of inquiry. He also discusses a growing new direction: using gravitational waves to probe dark matter. Watch Bertone’s SFI seminar: youtube.com/watch?v=AfO9MPEi…

All of biology is transient. Over time, a population of identical cells can change so that some subgroups exhibit different behaviors — such as different size, protein expression, or metabolism. Cell biologists have long assumed that these population-scale behaviors are determined by individual-level mechanisms, and that observations of these subgroups can reveal what happens at the single-cell level.  Mathematical biologist and SFI Postdoctoral Fellow James Holehouse challenges that assumption in a recent paper, describing real-world counterexamples in which population-level cellular patterns don’t correspond to individual behaviors. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Join us tomorrow at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for SFI’s Community Lecture with Tom McCarthy. In this exclusive event, McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity. Tomorrow | May 12 | 7:30 pm MT Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-indefi… or watch the live stream on SFI’s YouTube.

In this SFI Seminar, Amos Golan (American University, SFI) discusses how to make decisions when available information is insufficient to identify a unique solution.  He presents an information-theoretic approach and compares it to other decision criteria using simulations and empirical examples. Watch Golan’s SFI seminar: youtube.com/watch?v=1MkC1UGO…

In 1989, the opening of the inner-German border marked a democratic turning point lived not only in institutions, but in everyday life. A recent SFI working group led by Katrin Schmelz and Sam Bowles examined the conditions under which liberal democracy may be sustainable in the long run, with a focus on the role of economic institutions.  Schmelz explains: "how we interact in our daily life — in our jobs, for example — shapes who we become as citizens, and how a democratic culture may thrive or be degraded.” Bowles adds: “As long as Americans feel left out of the major decisions that are altering their lives, democracy will be in danger in this country."  Lessons from the working group will inform a new research agenda that Schmelz and Bowles will develop over the next decade. santafe.edu/news-center/news…

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Tom McCarthy on May 12, 7:30 pm at @TheLensic. McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity.  Drawing on twentieth-century visual art as well as classical and eighteenth-century philosophy, he will reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose. When: May 12, 2026 | 7:30pm Where: Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM. Free tickets: lensic.org/events/the-indefi… Presented free to the public thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center and the Santa Fe Reporter.

Beyond Borders, the quarterly column by SFI President David Krakauer, is available on Substack! In “The Biophysics of Paradigm Change,” Krakauer moves from evolved accelerometers to cultural knowledge, paradigm change, and adaptive technology. Read the full column here: sfiscience.substack.com/p/th…

The Spring 2026 issue of Parallax is out! Explore the latest research, ideas, and voices from the Santa Fe Institute community in our quarterly newsletter. Read the new issue online now: sfi-edu.s3.amazonaws.com/sfi…

A chair can still look like a chair, even when reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good at recognizing objects from this kind of minimal 3D information.  A new study by SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu and co-authors asks whether deep learning models represent 3D shapes in similar ways, and finds that hierarchical abstraction is key to more human-like performance. santafe.edu/news-center/news…