A cell is fundamentally a container—a vessel that encapsulates life at the most basic level. Many biologists believe ...

A recent special issue of Philosophical Transactions B takes on one of the biggest mysteries in science: how life first began ...

Sahana Subramanyam was a participant in SFI's 2018 summer Research Experience for Undergraduates — now called the Undergraduate Complexity Research program. In this essay, she reflects on how the ...

Convening a global cohort of curious, driven, generous, and brilliant people from across a vast range of expertise and career stages sets the possibility space for SFI’s Complex Systems Summer School, ...

Scott Page Professor of Complexity at the University of Michigan; Science Board Member + External Professor at SFI ...

This working group brings together scholars from diverse fields—neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and AI—who are all investigating the broad notion of “intelligence”, whether in biological systems ...

SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Across biology — from microbial communities to cancer tumors to ancient human populations — researchers measure diversity in ways that shape how we understand life. But those measurements are often ...

In the 1980s and ’90s, SFI played laboratory to a promising new method known as agent-based modeling. Instead of relying on averages and unrealistic mathematical assumptions, these models were built ...

Artificial-intelligence systems have made remarkable progress in recent years, but they still struggle with the kind of flexible, relational reasoning that comes naturally to humans. Program ...

The program is held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. During the work week UCR studetns conduct their research at the Santa Fe Institute's (SFI) Cowan Campus. Students live at the Institute of American ...

Processual archaeologists began employing some of the vocabulary now current in complexity studies in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by cybernetics, general systems theory, and contemporary ...