Santa Fe Institute

David Krakauer is the President of the Santa Fe Institute and Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation and the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin. His research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture. This includes genetic, neural, linguistic and cultural mechanisms. The research spans multiple levels of organization, seeking analogous patterns and principles in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society. At the cellular level, David has been interested in molecular processes, which rely on volatile, error-prone, asynchronous, mechanisms, which can be used as a basis for decision making and patterning. David also investigates how signaling interactions at higher levels, including microbial and organismal, are used to coordinate complex life cycles and social systems, and under what conditions we observe the emergence of proto-grammars. Much of this work is motivated by the search for ‘noisy-design’ principles in biology and culture emerging through evolutionary dynamics that span hierarchical structures.

Before joining the Santa Fe Institute, David Krakauer served as visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University. He also has been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara. In 2012 he was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people “who will change the World.”

Plenary Address:    The Evolution of Memory Systems andthe Diversity of Darwinian Demons:  “Time moves in one direction, memory in another” — William Gibson (Krakauer Plenary Abstract)

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