Property:Biography
From Complex Time
This is a property of type Text.
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Amy is finishing her PhD in Economics at the University of Washington, with a focus on labor and development economics. She just started a new position as a research analyst with the Center for Sustainable Energy in San Diego, where she lives with her husband and two sons. +
Andrew studies the archaeology of digital spaces and how humans inhabit them and founded the subdiscipline of video game archaeology (aka archaeogaming). In 2014 he helped excavate the Atari Burial Ground in Alamogordo, NM. In 2018 he documented the mass migration of hundreds of players in the game No Man's Sky who were displaced by a catastrophic climate change event. +
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Born in Berlin, Florian trained as an engineer, interested in reducing biofuels cost. He then monitored word-of-mouth campaigns as data scientist in the Marketing industry. Back in academia, he focuses on Marketing embedded in dynamic systems, from investigating how growing e-commerce affects energy consumtion of an economy, to how consumers life courses evolve post retirement, now that they life more than a decade longer. Florian now works in Lancaster, UK, where he lives with his family. +
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Caitlin McShea is Director of the Santa Fe Institute’s InterPlanetary Project, host of the Alien Crash Site podcast, illustrator and editor (along with SFI President David Krakauer) of the InterPlanetary Transmissions Volumes, published by the SFI Press, and one half of the space-musing duo Atlantis. She coordinates SFI's public events, including our prestigious Community Lecture Series. She manages the James S. McDonnell Foundation-funded research track on Complex Time, the National Science Foundation-funded research track on Life's Origins, and general cultural outreach for the Santa Fe Institute.
Caitlin studied evolutionary biology and philosophy at Southwestern University, and earned a Masters in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College. For six years, she directed two contemporary art galleries before joining SFI. She is enamored by creativity: its inevitability, its irrepressibility, and, most curiously, its origin. When she’s not thinking about creativity, she is employing it – usually in the kitchen. When she’s not cooking, she's likely to be found sitting at the copper bar of the Shed, or curled up on the couch with her beautiful dog, Sullivan, re-reading Gabriel García Márquez. +
Chhavi is currently pursuing Ph.D. in Economics from Indian Institute of Management, Ranchi. Her research interests are Migration, Inequality, Development, and Environment. +
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Currently studying Agent Based models for describing and assessing the formation processes of settlement patterns. My work is focused on settlement patterns that are observed in archaeological research and ways to interpret them. My previous background is software development and quantitative methods in archaeology. +
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Daniel Geschwind holds the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics and is a professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is director of the Neurogenetics Program and the Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART) and co-director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics. Professor Geschwind obtained an A.B. degree in psychology and chemistry at Dartmouth College. Following two years of The Boston Consulting Group, he obtained MD and PhD degrees at Yale University School of Medicine in 1991. He completed his neurology residency at UCLA, where he has remained following training, joining the faculty in 1997. The Geschwind laboratory focuses on integrating basic neurobiology, genetics, and genomics with translational studies of human diseases. One area of basic investigation has been in the analysis of transcriptome data where his group has used network biology approaches to understand brain transcriptome organization. Professor Geschwind has also put considerable effort into fostering large-scale collaborative patient resources for genetic research and data sharing. He played a major role in the founding, and has provided continuing scientific oversight, of the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE), the largest collection of multiplex autism families in the world. He has served on numerous scientific advisory boards, including the NIH Council of Councils, the Executive Council of the American Neurological Association (ANA), and Co-Chairs the neurogentics section of the Faculty of 1000 Medicine. He received the Derek Denny-Brown Neurological Scholar Award from the ANA in 2004, the Scientific Service Award from Autism Speaks in 2007, the Ruane Prize from the Brain and Behavior Foundation in 2013 and is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. +
David’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture. This includes genetic, neural, linguistic and cultural mechanisms. The research spans multiple levels of organization, seeking analogous patterns and principles in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society. At the cellular level David has been interested in molecular processes, which rely on volatile, error-prone, asynchronous, mechanisms, which can be used as a basis for decision making and patterning. David also investigates how signaling interactions at higher levels, including microbial and organismal, are used to coordinate complex life cycles and social systems, and under what conditions we observe the emergence of proto-grammars. Much of this work is motivated by the search for 'noisy-design' principles in biology and culture emerging through evolutionary dynamics that span hierarchical structures.
Research projects includes work on the molecular logic of signaling pathways, the evolution of genome organization (redundancy, multiple encoding, quantization and compression), robust communication over networks, the evolution of distributed forms of biological information processing, dynamical memory systems, the logic of transmissible regulatory networks (such as virus life cycles) and the many ways in which organisms construct their environments (niche construction). Thinking about niche constructing niches provides us with a new perspective on the major evolutionary transitions.
Many of these areas are characterized by the need to encode heritable information (genetic, epigenetic, auto-catalytic or linguistic) at distinct levels of biological organization, where selection pressures are often independent or in conflict. Furthermore, components are noisy and degrade and interactions are typically diffusively coupled. At each level David asks how information is acquired, stored, transmitted, replicated, transformed and robustly encoded.
The big question that many are asking is what will evolutionary theory look like once it has become integrated with the sciences of adaptive information (information theory and computation), and of course, what will these sciences then look like?
Krakauer was previously chair of the faculty and a resident professor and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. A graduate of the University of London, where he went on to earn degrees in biology, and computer science. Dr. Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995. He remained at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow, and two years later was named a Wellcome Research Fellow in mathematical biology and lecturer at Pembroke College. In 1999, he accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and served as visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University. He moved on to the Santa Fe Institute as a professor three years later and was made faculty chair in 2009. Dr. Krakauer has been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara. In 2012 Dr. Krakauer was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people "who will change the World."
David Krakauer also served as the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and was a Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Dr. Plenz is Chief of the Section on Critical Brain Dynamics in the Intramural Research Program at the NIMH. He attended college at the Universities of Mainz and Tuebingen, Germany. Under the supervision of Prof. Valentino Braitenberg and Ad Aertsen, he received his Ph.D. in 1993 at the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics/University Tuebingen, where he pioneered the development of in vitro cortex networks to study the emergence of neuronal population dynamics. During his 3 year postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen T. Kitai at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, he developed advanced cortex-forebrain neuronal cultures that allowed him to identify the mechanisms of distinct activity patterns that characterize normal and abnormal population dynamics in cortex and basal ganglia. Dr. Plenz joined the NIMH as a Tenure-track Investigator in 1999 and was promoted to Senior Investigator with tenure in 2006. His laboratory combines electrophysiological and imaging techniques and neural modeling to study the self-organization of neuronal networks. +
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First trained as an ecologist, Julie is now a postbaccalaureate student in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder researching the intensely interesting questions at the intersections between these two fields. She plans to continue on to graduate work in these areas. +
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Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. West served as SFI President from July 2005 through July 2009. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he was the leader, and founder, of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is one of only approximately ten Senior Fellows.
His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This led to the development of realistic quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles. This work, begun at the Institute, has received much attention in both the scientific and popular press, and provides a framework for quantitative understanding of problems ranging from fundamental issues in biology (such as cell size, growth, metabolic rate, DNA nucleotide substitution rates, and the structure and dynamics of ecosystems) to questions at the forefront of medical research (such as aging, sleep, and cancer). Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to understand quantitatively the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, including the relationships between economies of scale, growth, innovation and wealth creation and their implications for long-term survivability and sustainability.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was one of their Centenary Speakers in 2003. He has been a lecturer in many popular and distinguished scientist series worldwide, as well as at the World Economic Forum. Among recent honors he was a co-receiver of the Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America, the Weldon Memorial Prize (2005), Oxford University and the Glenn Award for research on Aging and the APS Szilard Award (2013). In 2006 he was named one of Timemagazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" and his work selected as one of the breakthrough ideas of 2007 by the Harvard Business Review. He is the author of several books, a visiting Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and an associate fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University.
West received his BA from Cambridge University in 1961 and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1966, where he returned in 1970 to become a member of the faculty. West is married to Jacqueline West, a psychologist in private practice; they have two children: Joshua, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California and an Olympic silver-medalist. Devorah, is studying International Studies at Stanford.
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I am a 4th year PhD student in Environmental/Development Economics. My research concerns the demographic projections for Chad in Africa's Sahel region. I look at how climate change effects fertility outcomes in Chad, and hence mid century demographic projections. +
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I am a finishing masters student that researches landscape connectivity for biological conservation. I have an interdisciplinary background and enjoy working with the public and communicating science. +
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I am a second year PhD in Environmental Science student at the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), Laguna, Philippines. My proposed dissertation is on the socio-ecological resilience of Agusan Marsh, Philippines. I am interested in studying the interplay between the wetland ecosystem and the floating communities in both temporal and spatial scales and how the dynamics of this interplay affect the resilience of both social and ecological components to natural and anthropogenic pressures. I'm a warm person who values my relationships with different people and treasure new learnings and experiences. +
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I am a second-year PhD student studying archaeology at the University of Colorado. My research interests include frontiers and borders, particularly trade and socioeconomic interaction processes in those spaces, and transitions in settlement patterns and landscape use that occurred in the Pueblo societies of the North American Southwest. +
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I am a sixth year Ph.D. student in economics at University of New Mexico. I am an applied microeconomist with research interests in the areas of food security, nutrition, health, cognition and other aspects of early childhood development. Currently my research focuses on cognitive catch-up during 'critical stages' as well as the different channels through which cognitive outcomes can be improved. Outside of my family and work, my favorite things are travelling, backpacking and barbecuing. +
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I am a third year PhD Student, a research enthusiast and also previously working in academia. +
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I am an Undergraduate student in Economics and Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, preparing a dissertation. I am currently interested in two projects: first, an agent based model to evaluate the impact of migrations on segregation, in the context of globalisation. Second, I am working on the paradigm shift needed to achieve a sustainable economic system and society. +
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I am broadly interested in global change conservation and specifically in regards to this course, how automated vehicles might induce explosive urban sprawl. Currently I am comparing models of urban growth that assume past patterns of spread are a reliable guide to future growth with models that that reflect anticipated efficiency with widespread adoption of AVs across the next few decades. +
