Santa Fe Institute Community Lectures

Gillian Tett is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Financial Times. She writes a weekly column on Friday, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She also serves as Provost of King's College, Cambridge.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is a leader in the study of cognitive science and of children’s learning and development.

Harper is an historian whose work integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past. He works on the global history of humans as agents of ecological change and asks how we can approach questions about biodiversity, health, and environmental sustainability from a historical perspective.

While president of the Royal Society (2015-2020), Ramakrishnan developed broader interest in science policy and public engagement. He is the author of Gene Machine, a frank popular memoir about the race for the structure of the ribosome, and Why We Perish: The New Science of Aging, and the Quest for Immortality (2024).

Our recent experiments in Artificial Life (ALife) have drawn new connections between theoretical biology and computer science with a series of experiments that show how "digital life" can evolve in a purely random universe. Such artificial life doesn’t evolve “classically,” powered by random mutation and selection, but through symbiogenesis, wherein small replicating entities combine into progressively bigger ones.