David Krakauer (born December 28, 1967) is an American evolutionary biologist. [1] He is the president and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. [2]
Born in Hawaii, Krakauer grew up in southern Portugal and moved to London, England, for secondary school. [3] [4]
He attended Royal Holloway University of London, where he earned degrees in computer science and mathematics. He received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995, where he stayed on as a postdoctoral research fellow. [2]
Krakauer has held positions as a visiting fellow at the Penn Genome Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Sage Fellow at the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a long-term fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University. [5] [2]
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he served as the founding director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and professor of mathematical genetics. [2]
Since 2015, Krakauer has served as the president and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He previously served as the institute's faculty chair and as a resident professor and an external professor. He also co-directs the Collective Computation Group (C4) at the Santa Fe Institute. [5] [2]
Krakauer was included in Wired Magazine 's Smart List 2012 as one of fifty people "who will change the world". [1]
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems. The institute is ranked 24th among the world's "Top Science and Technology Think Tanks" and 24th among the world's "Best Transdisciplinary Research Think Tanks" according to the 2020 edition of the Global Go To Think Tank Index Reports, published annually by the University of Pennsylvania.
John Henry Holland was an American scientist and professor of psychology and electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms.
Michael L. Rosenzweig is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He developed and popularized the concept of reconciliation ecology. He received his Ph.D in zoology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and has held a number of academic positions around the United States.
Simon Asher Levin is an American ecologist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He specializes in using mathematical modeling and empirical studies in the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.
David Pines was a US physicist recognized for his work in quantum many-body systems in condensed matter and nuclear physics. With his advisor David Bohm, he contributed to the understanding of electron interactions in metals. Bohm and Pines introduced the plasmon, the quantum of electron density oscillations in metals. They pioneered the use of the random phase approximation. His work with John Bardeen on electron-phonon interactions led to the development of the BCS theory of superconductivity. Pines extended BCS theory to nuclear physics to explain stability of isotopes with even and odd numbers of nucleons. He also used the theory of superfluidity to explain the glitches in neutron stars.
Joshua Morris Epstein is Professor of Epidemiology at the New York University College of Global Public Health. Formerly Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in the departments of Applied Mathematics, Economics, Biostatistics, International Health, and Environmental Health Sciences and the Director of the JHU Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences. He is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Identifying and Prioritizing New Preventive Vaccines.
Hans-Joachim Bremermann (1926–1996) was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.
George Frederick Oster NAS was an American mathematical biologist, and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at University of California, Berkeley. He made seminal contributions to several varied fields including chaos theory, population dynamics, membrane dynamics and molecular motors. He was a 1985 MacArthur Fellow.
Vincent Daniel Blondel is a Belgian professor of applied mathematics and former rector of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blondel's research lies in the area of mathematical control theory and theoretical computer science. He is mostly known for his contributions in computational complexity in control, multi-agent coordination and complex networks.
Scott E. Page is an American social scientist and John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he has been working since 2000. He has also been director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan (2009–2014) and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.
James P. Crutchfield is an American mathematician and physicist. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in physics there in 1983. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, where he is director of the Complexity Sciences Center—a new research and graduate program in complex systems. Prior to this, he was research professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group and SFI's Network Dynamics Program. From 1985 to 1997, he was a research physicist in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting research professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco; a postdoctoral fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UCB; a UCB physics department IBM postdoctoral fellow in condensed matter physics; a distinguished visiting research professor of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and a Bernard Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
Marcus William Feldman is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) at Stanford University. He is an Australian-born mathematician turned American theoretical biologist, best known for his mathematical evolutionary theory and computational studies in evolutionary biology, and for originating with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza the theory of cultural evolution.
David Hilton Wolpert is an American physicist and computer scientist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received two awards. His name is particularly associated with a theorem in computer science known as "no free lunch".
J. Stephen Lansing is an American anthropologist and complexity scientist. He is especially known from his decades of research on the emergent properties of human-environmental interactions in Bali, Borneo and the Malay Archipelago; social-ecological modeling, and complex adaptive systems. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna; a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford; a visiting scholar at the Hoffman Global Institute for Business and Society at INSEAD Singapore, and emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.
Elchanan Mossel is a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research fields are probability theory, combinatorics, and statistical inference.
Jean Marie Carlson is a professor of complexity at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies robustness and feedback in highly connected complex systems, which have applications in a variety of areas including earthquakes, wildfires and neuroscience.
Laura Fortunato is an evolutionary anthropologist whose research investigates the evolution of human social and cultural behavior. She investigates topics such as the evolution of kinship and marriage systems, social complexity and culture. She is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Jessica C. Flack is a data scientist, evolutionary biologist, and professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
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