Santa Fe Institute

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.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/brian-enquist-receives-robert-h-macarthur-award

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.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/han-van-der-maas-named-director-of-amsterdams-institute-for-advanced-study

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.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/smart-parts-for-smart-wholes

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuPz09dpLSc

In this SFI Seminar, Gianfranco Bertone (Gianfranco Bertone Blog) 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfO9MPEier4