Santa Fe Institute

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_HmfSz8aGQ

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

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova 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.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/marina-dubova-receives-dissertation-prize

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

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.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/aaron-clauset-receives-honors-from-aaas-and-university-of-new-mexico

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.”

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/laurent-hebert-dufresne-receives-erdos-renyi-prize

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

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.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/why-noise-may-be-the-key-to-understanding-cell-group-patterns