Santa Fe Institute Press Kit

Resident Research Faculty
Board of Trustees
SFI President, Jeremy Sabloff

The Santa Fe Institute is a private, non-profit, independent research center founded in 1984, for multidisciplinary collaborations in the physical, biological, computational and social sciences. SFI is known as a leader in multidisciplinary scientific research and as the founding institution of complexity science. Complex systems research attempts to uncover and understand the deep commonalities that underlie artificial, human, and natural systems. This research relies on theories and tools from across the sciences.

The Santa Fe Institute attracts renowned scientists and researchers from around the world to collaborate in attempts to uncover the mechanisms that underlie the deep simplicity present in our complex world. The Institute pioneered a new kind of scientific research community taking insight from various disciplines as well as integrating scientific insights with key challenges that businesses and government entities face. Three advisory bodies - the Board of Trustees, the Science Board and the Science Steering Committee (SSC) - provide advice, oversight and support.

While topics often overlap, the main areas the Santa Fe Institute engages in research are:

Physics of Complex Systems
Emergence, Innovation and Robustness in Evolutionary Systems
Information Processing & Computation in Complex Systems
Dynamics & Quantitative Studies of Human Behavior
Emergence, Organization & Dynamics of Living Systems

The Institute strives to understand and explain phenomena in the natural, physical and social world which is critical to addressing key environmental, technological, biological, economic, and political challenges. In the process of answering important questions, SFI has developed new models, new tools and new methods of inquiry that continue to transform science. Well-known examples are chaos theory, swarm theory and network theory.