Complexity Explorer Santa Fe Institute

David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. David's research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties.

Maell Cullen, SFI postdoctoral fellow

Maell serves as the Teaching Fellow for the Intelligence & Representation program. He is interested in questions within theoretical neuroscience, information theory, and machine learning. His work develops computational models of perception and learning. Currently he focuses on the acquisition and loss of skills and cognitive ability.

Renée Tursi, Manager, SFI President's Office

Renée will oversee day-to-day operations of the "Intelligence & Representation" summer school, assisting faculty and students in Cambridge. At SFI, she manages the President's Office, which includes shepherding special projects and external relations. Before joining SFI, Renée was a tenured professor of English in Connecticut for many years. Having earned her PhD in literature from Columbia University, she focused her interdisciplinary research on American literature and pragmatism.

Nihat Ay • Santa Fe Institute (US) 

Nihat is a SFI professor and Head of the Institute for Data Science Foundations at Hamburg University of Technology (DE). He is a mathematician with particular expertise in information geometry, with his work centering on theories of learning and embodied intelligence.

Erica Cartmill • University of California, Los Angeles (US)

Erica is a professor of anthropology and developmental psychology at University of California, Los Angeles (US). She studies the acquisition and evolution of human language and in particular how the multimodal aspects of communication contribute and constrain the construction of meaning.

Stephen Cave • University of Cambridge (UK)

Stephen is the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, all at the University of Cambridge. His research is mostly in the philosophy of technology, investigating the ethics of AI, robotics, life-extension, and the philosophy of (im)mortality.

Hasok Chang • University of Cambridge (UK)

Hasok is the Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research interests focus on the history & philosophy of chemistry and physics from the 18th century onward; philosophy of scientific practice; and other topics in the philosophy of science, including measurement, realism, evidence, pluralism and pragmatism.

Jacob Foster • University of California, Los Angeles (US)

Jacob is a professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles (US). His interests lie in the social production of collective intelligence, evolutionary dynamics of ideas, and the co-construction of culture and cognition.

Kate Joyce

Kate is a photographer working in typologies and relationships between pictures and literature, in countries such as Chile, Guatemala, Iceland, South Africa, and Spain. She has three published books. Find out more about her work at her studio site.

John Krakauer • Santa Fe Institute (US)

John is a SFI external professor and professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (US), and director of the BLAM Lab. He has particular expertise in sensori- and visuo-motor learning and memory representations.

Tamar Makin • University of Cambridge (UK)

Tamar is a neuroscientist at MRC CBU at the University of Cambridge, heading the Plasticity Lab. Her main interest is in understanding the key drivers and limitations of reorganisation in the adult brain.

Tom McCarthy • Santa Fe Institute (US)

Tom is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. He is a SFI Miller scholar and has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt.

Melanie Mitchell • Santa Fe Institute (US)

Melanie is the Davis Professor of Complexity at SFI. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems.

Francis Neary • University of Cambridge (UK) 

Francis was a contributer to the Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge, a project that chronicles Darwin's scientific ideas and theories through his personal correspondence.

Orit Peleg • Santa Fe Institute (US)

Orit is a SFI external professor and professor of computer science and in the BioFrontiers Institute at University of Colorado, Boulder (US). She is a biophysicist interested in collective behaviors and sensing in living systems.

Murray Shanahan • Imperial College London & DeepMind (UK)

Murray is professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and senior research scientist at DeepMind. He is interested in cognition and in particular in AI systems that interact with their environments.

Geoffrey West • Santa Fe Institute (US)

Geoffrey is Shannan Distinguished Professor at SFI. He is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests are in fundamental questions in physics. He is widely known for his work on scaling theory to explain biological and anthropogenic systems.