[[File:Bruch.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://santafe.edu/people/profile/elizabeth-bruch '''Elizabeth Bruch''']<br>Santa Fe Institute and University of Michigan]]
[[File:JamesEvans.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://sociology.uchicago.edu/directory/james-evans '''James Evans''']<br>University of Chicago & Santa Fe Institute]]
'''Elizabeth Bruch''' is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan in 2008, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy program. She earned a PhD in Sociology and MS in Statistics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
'''James Evans'''' research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of human understanding. James is especially interested in innovation—how new ideas and practices emerge—and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology, but he is also interested in other domains of knowledge—news, law, religion, gossip, hunches and historical modes of thinking and knowing. James supports the creation of novel observatories for human understanding and action through crowd sourcing, information extraction from text and images, and the use of distributed sensors (e.g., RFID tags, cell phones). He uses machine learning, generative modeling, social and semantic network representations to explore knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field-methods, and create alternatives to current discovery regimes. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Templeton Foundation and other sources, and has been published in Science, American Journal of Sociology, Social Studies of Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, PLoS Computational Biology and other journals. His work has also been featured in Nature, the Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, NPR, BBC, El País, CNN and many other outlets.
Bruch's longstanding interest is in the quantitative study of human behavior, and what it implies for larger scale social patterns and dynamics.
Her research combines substantive knowledge of human behavior from cognitive science, marketing, and decision theory with statistical techniques and richly textured online activity data in an effort to understand the dynamic interplay between human behavior and the social environment.
She has developed "cognitively plausible" statistical models of neighborhood and mate choice and is applying models from behavioral ecology to understand how men and women adapt their mate-seeking strategies to particular romantic markets.
She is also exploring how online dating markets are divided vertically into "leagues" and horizontally into "submarkets", as well as how people organize their search for romantic partners in space and time.
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[[File:Katy Börner.jpg|thumb|180px|[http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/ '''Katy Börner''']<br>Indiana University Bloomington]]
'''Katy Börner''' is the Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Information Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, and Founding Director of the [http://cns.iu.edu/ Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center] at Indiana University, Bloomington; Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands; and Visiting Professor and Mercator Fellow, Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Börner has been teaching the Information Visualization MOOC (IVMOOC) for six years and her team is actively developing learning, analytics, data mining, and visualization tools for teachers, students, learning scientists, and leadership. She is the author of the ''Atlas of Science'' and the ''Atlas of Knowledge'', both from the MIT Press, and a curator of the international [http://scimaps.org/ Places & Spaces: Mapping Science] exhibit. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997. She is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, and in 2017 she received a Humboldt Research Fellowship.
At University of Chicago, James is the Director of Knowledge Lab, which has collaborative, granting and employment opportunities, as well as ongoing seminars. He also sponsors the Computational Social Science workshop (with John Brehm) and the Knowledge-Value workshop (with John Kelly) and co-organizes the Rational Choice workshop (with Gary Becker, Richard Posner & Glen Weyl). He teaches courses in the history of modern science, science studies, computational content analysis, and Internet and Society. Before Chicago, James received his doctorate in sociology from Stanford University, served as a research associate in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets group at Harvard Business School, started a private high school focused on project-based arts education, and completed a B. A. in Anthropology and Economics at Brigham Young University.
'''Alan Cheville''' is the T. Jefferson Miers Chair In Electrical Engineering at Bucknell University. "I took the position as chair in electrical and computer engineering at Bucknell," he says, "because while I loved the excitement and passion of policy [while at the National Science Foundation], I missed engaging with students in the classroom. My interests tend to be eclectic, but right now I am focusing on engineering design education, engineering education policy, and the philosophy of engineering education. I am also trying to tie my lifelong interests in stories and games into my work which is easier at a place like Bucknell. My passion is education in the broadest sense of the word; it is all that stands between us and a future that threatens our survival on this planet. If I have developed any philosophy of education over the years it is 'We Become What We Do'."
'''Kristen Eshleman''' is the Director of Digital Innovation at Davidson College, where she leads a campus-wide innovation initiative focused on the design and research of mission-aligned experimentation that reimagines a traditional liberal arts institution in the current context. As part of Technology & Innovation, this initiative intentionally pushes the envelope to adapt and respond strategically to rapid changes in the digital age. In partnership with the Cynefin Center for Applied Complexity at the University of Bangor, she is also pursuing research on institutions as complex adaptive systems and how these might be optimally structured to foster and account for emergence.
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[[File: Norman L. Fortenberry.jpeg|thumb|180px|[https://www.asee.org/about-us/the-organization/executive-director-msg '''Norman Fortenberry''']<br>American Society for Engineering Education]]
'''Norman Fortenberry''' is the executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), an international society of individual, institutional, and corporate members founded in 1893. ASEE is committed to furthering education in engineering and engineering technology by promoting global excellence in engineering and engineering technology instruction, research, public service, professional practice, and societal awareness. Previously, Fortenberry served as the founding Director of the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE) at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He served in various executive roles at the National Science Foundation (NSF) including as senior advisor to the NSF Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources and as director of the divisions of undergraduate education and human resource development. Fortenberry has also served as executive director of the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc. (The GEM Consortium) and as a faculty member in the department of mechanical engineering at the Florida A&M University – Florida State University College of Engineering. Dr. Fortenberry was awarded the S.B., S.M., and Sc.D. degrees (all in mechanical engineering) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
'''Joshua Fost''' completed a B.A. in neuroscience and philosophy at Bowdoin College, and then earned a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience at Princeton and was a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University. In 1998 he left academics to work as a consultant and later a Chief Technology Officer, working for companies ranging from internet startups to a $1 billion international commercial real estate company. In 2004, InfoWorld magazine recognized him as one of the top 25 CTOs in the United States. In 2005 he returned to academia, first teaching neuroaesthetics at Hampshire College, then becoming an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon, where he taught and wrote at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. He also developed and taught a variety of courses in the university’s freshman and sophomore general education program, on topics including architecture, comics, the philosophy of science, robotics, and artificial life. He joined Minerva in the spring of 2015 and is currently the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies.
'''Steven Gluckstern''' currently serves as Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of TeacherCraft, LLC, a new digitally- based education company. TeacherCraft focuses on the improvement of student outcomes through the development and implementation of a curriculum specific online professional learning system designed for the retraining of America’s public, private, and charter school teachers as well as home-schooling parents.Previously, he served as founder, core investor, and as a senior executive at a series of neuroscience companies pioneering the development of non-invasive tools for the treatment of conditions and diseases of the central nervous system. Mr. Gluckstern was also a general partner of Azimuth Trust Company, LLC. This alternative asset management firm provided asset allocation, portfolio construction, manager selection and comprehensive risk management to both private and public-sector investors with non-traditional financial investments, such as hedge and private equity funds. Mr. Gluckstern co-founded the firm in 2002 and served as its CEO until 2005.
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[[File: Dahpon Ho.JPG|thumb|180px|[http://www.sas.rochester.edu/his/people/faculty/ho_dahpon/index.html '''Dahpon Ho''']<br>University of Rochester]]
'''Dahpon Ho''' is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Rochester. His principal interests are maritime history and the ways that flows of trade, people, and goods have shaped life in China and East Asia from the early-modern period to the present. His first book project, ''Sealords Live in Vain'', tells the story of how the maritime province of Fujian in southeast China was transformed by trade and piracy into an outlaw frontier in the 17th century. In future projects, he hopes to examine topics such as population mobility in Chinese history and also the rise of robotics and cybernetics in East Asia.
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[[File:Christopher-Hoadley.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty/Christopher_Hoadley/ '''Christopher Hoadley''']<br>New York University]]
'''Christopher Hoadley''' is associate professor in the Educational Communication and Technology Program, the Program in Digital Media Design for Learning, and the Program on Games for Learning at New York University. He has over 40 years experience designing and building educational technology, and has researched connections between technology, learning, and collaboration for over 30 years. His research focuses on collaborative technologies, computer support for cooperative learning (CSCL), and design-based research methods, a term he coined in the late 1990s. Hoadley is the director of dolcelab, the Laboratory for Design Of Learning, Collaboration & Experience. He is a fellow of the International Society for the Learning Sciences (ISLS) and was an affiliate scholar for the National Academy of Engineering's Center for the Advancement of Scholarship in Engineering Education (CASEE). Hoadley was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in the South Asia Regional Research program to study educational technologies for sustainability and empowerment in rural Himalayan villages in 2008-2009. From 2011-2013, he was program director of the Educational Technology programs at NYU and founding program director of the Games for Learning program, and on the founding faculty presidium of MAGNET, the NYU Media And Games Network. From 2013-2016, he was on loan to the National Science Foundation as the program director in charge of the Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program in the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering and the Directorate of Education and Human Resources Division of Research on Learning.
'''Rebecca Jablonsky''' is a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she conducts an ethnographic study of the use of mindfulness technologies to combat stress, information overload, depression, and anxiety in contemporary American life. Prior to entering the PhD program, she was a research fellow at the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy at UC Berkeley, where she conducted a research project that investigated how neighborhood watch was enacted on the social network Nextdoor.com. She has also worked as a professional User Experience Designer in the SF Bay Area after earning a Master’s of Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and an MA in Psychology from New York University.
'''Rebecca Kantar''' is the Founder of Imbellus. Imbellus is a venture-backed technology company that is reinventing how we measure human potential. Imbellus has raised $4M from Upfront Ventures, Thrive Capital and Sound Ventures. Rebecca was an Entrepreneur In Residence at GLG from 2014-2016. Previously, Rebecca and her expert-network startup, BrightCo, joined GLG in the summer of 2014. Rebecca has spoken at several TEDx events, StartUp Iceland, Cisco Live, the Dell Social Innovation Summer Institute, the Nexus Global Youth Summit, the United Nations 11th Annual Day of Youth, and for teams at Coca-Cola and Red Bull. Rebecca was a Fellow at the 2013 Nantucket Project and serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Response. Rebecca dropped out of Harvard College at the age of 19 and now lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
<div id="David Krakauer"></div>[[File:Davidkrakauer2.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://santafe.edu/people/profile/david-krakauer/ '''David Krakauer''']<br>Santa Fe Institute]]
'''Matt Koehler''' is the Applied Complexity Sciences Area Lead in the Information Discovery and Understanding Department at The MITRE Corporation. Before joining MITRE, Matt was a Presidential Management Fellow at the Center for Army Analysis. Matt holds an AB in Anthropology from Kenyon College, a MPA from Indiana University, and a JD from George Washington University, and a PhD in Computational Social Science from the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study’s Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University.
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[[File:Charles-larkin.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://www.tcd.ie/business/people/charles-larkin.php '''Charles Larkin''']<br>Trinity College Dublin]]
'''Charles Larkin''' is a Lecturer in Economics and Finance at Cardiff Metropolitan University and a Research Associate/Adjunct Lecturer at Trinity Business School. Dr. Larkin is also special adviser on economic policy matters to Sen. Sean D. Barrett, Seanad Éireann, where he has drafted seven pieces of legislation and contributed to dozens more legislative and regulatory items through amendments and high level discussions with ministers and senior government officials. Charles' main areas of policy advice are political economy, public policy and IMF bailouts. His main research interest in the legal aspects and political effects of fiscal management has inspired two further themes in his research: on the history of economic thought and on the connections between educational policy and innovation-led growth.
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[[File:Theresa-Maldonado.jpg|thumb|180px|[http://engineering.utep.edu/announcement051817.htm '''Theresa Maldonado''']<br>University of Texas at El Paso]]
'''Theresa Maldonado''' is the Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Starting her engineering career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Maldonado went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and pursue research and teaching at The University of Texas at Arlington. She earned tenure there and was promoted to professor, taking on administrative roles as an associate dean of engineering and then associate vice president for research. She also has served as associate dean of engineering at Texas A&M University, associate vice chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, and division director at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
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[[File:Doug-Melton.jpg|thumb|180px|[http://www.kffdn.org/staff/doug-melton/ '''Doug Melton''']<br>Kern Family Foundation]]
'''Doug Melton''', a director for the Entrepreneurial Engineering Program at The Kern Family Foundation, is passionate about developing engineering education that fosters an entrepreneurial mindset in students. Melton works closely with faculty and administrators at the universities that comprise the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), which works to develop future generations of entrepreneurially minded engineers by investing in initiatives and programs at select institutions of higher learning. With 17 years as a faculty member within the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Kettering University, and having served as the program director for Entrepreneurship Across the University, Melton understands the importance of relating technical topics in an engaging and relevant manner. Before coming to the Foundation in 2012, Melton worked as the director of research and development at Digisonix Incorporated. His team created adaptive, multi-channel system identification, signal processing, and control strategies. His work combined business, technical, and educational aspects, and contributes to his current work in engineering education. Melton earned his Ph. D. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, his M.S. in electrical engineering from Ohio State University, and his B.S.E.E. from Wichita State University.
'''David Krakauer''' is the President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. David’s 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.
Research projects includes work on the molecular logic of signaling pathways, the evolution of genome organization (redundancy, multiple encoding, quantization and compression), robust communication over networks, the evolution of distributed forms of biological information processing, dynamical memory systems, the logic of transmissible regulatory networks (such as virus life cycles) and the many ways in which organisms construct their environments (niche construction). Thinking about niche constructing niches provides us with a new perspective on the major evolutionary transitions.
Many of these areas are characterized by the need to encode heritable information (genetic, epigenetic, auto-catalytic or linguistic) at distinct levels of biological organization, where selection pressures are often independent or in conflict. Furthermore, components are noisy and degrade and interactions are typically diffusively coupled. At each level David asks how information is acquired, stored, transmitted, replicated, transformed and robustly encoded.
The big question that many are asking is what will evolutionary theory look like once it has become integrated with the sciences of adaptive information (information theory and computation), and of course, what will these sciences then look like?
Krakauer was previously chair of the faculty and a resident professor and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. A graduate of the University of London, where he went on to earn degrees in biology, and computer science. Dr. Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995. He remained at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow, and two years later was named a Wellcome Research Fellow in mathematical biology and lecturer at Pembroke College. In 1999, he accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and served as visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University. He moved on to the Santa Fe Institute as a professor three years later and was made faculty chair in 2009. Dr. Krakauer 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 Dr. Krakauer was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people "who will change the World."
David Krakauer also served as the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and was a Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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[[File:Richard-Miller.jpeg|thumb|180px|[http://www.olin.edu/faculty/profile/richard-miller/ '''Richard Miller''']<br>Olin College of Engineering]]
[[File:Manfred.Laubichler.wiki.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://sols.asu.edu/manfred-laubichler '''Manfred Laubichler''']<br>Santa Fe Institute and Arizona State University]]
'''Richard Miller''' was appointed President and first employee of Olin College of Engineering in 1999. Previously, he served as Dean of Engineering at the University of Iowa, Associate Dean of Engineering at USC in Los Angeles, and assistant professor of engineering at UCSB in Santa Barbara. With a background in applied mechanics and current interests in innovation in higher education, Miller is the author of more than 100 reviewed journal articles and other technical publications. He received the 2017 Brock International Prize in Education for his many contributions to the reinvention of engineering education in the 21st century. Together with two Olin colleagues, he received the 2013 Bernard M. Gordon Prize from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a member of both the NAE and the National Academy of Inventors.
'''Manfred Laubichler''' is a theoretical biologist and historian of science. His undergraduate training was in zoology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna (Austria) and his graduate training was in biology at Yale and in History/History of Science at Princeton. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and co-director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, an associate director of ASU's Origins Project, an adjunct scientist with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA, a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, Guest Professor at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, and on the external faculty of the KLI in Klosterneuburg, Austria. He is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the WIssenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
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[[File:Priya-Mohabir.png|thumb|180px|[https://nysci.org/people/priya-mohabir/ '''Priya Mohabir''']<br>New York Hall of Science]]
[[File:Sethi_Headshot.jpeg|thumb|180px|[http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/index.htm '''Rajiv Sethi''']<br>Santa Fe Institute and Columbia University]]
'''Priya Mohabir''' is Vice President of Youth Development at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI). She has been with NYSCI for the last 14 years, starting as an Explainer. From 2005 to 2009, Priya was the NYSCI lead for Urban Advantage, a standards-based partnership program designed to improve students’ understanding of scientific inquiry through collaborations between urban public school systems and science cultural institutions. In 2009, Priya returned to the Explainer Department bringing her experience in developing and implementing professional development workshops to both the Explainers and Explainer Leadership Team. Over the last few years, Priya has worked to develop the Science Career Ladder Institute for STEM Learning, comprised of career development workshops and opportunities, extended residency experiences in education and research, and mentoring opportunities. As the new director of the Alan J. Friedman Center for the Development of Young Scientists, Priya will lead the Science Career Ladder as well as the Science Career Ladder Institute. Working with the Explainer leadership team she will continue to develop new and interesting opportunities for the Explainers and residents, including additional programs to cultivate the interests and careers of young scientists.
'''Rajiv Sethi''' is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research areas include microeconomics and game theory, with applications to prediction markets, communication, crime, and inequality. He is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy, and is a founding member of CORE (Curriculum Open-Access Resources for Economics), an organization dedicated to the production of high-quality resources for the teaching of economics, distributed free of charge worldwide under a Creative Commons license.
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[[File:EducSpeakerPlaceholder.jpg|thumb|180px|'''Dianne M. Parrotte'''<br>Cognex Corporation]]
[[File:WillTracy.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://santafe.edu/people/profile/william-tracy/ '''William Tracy''']<br>Santa Fe Institute]]
'''Dianne M. Parrotte''' has served as an independent consultant to corporations, law firms and insurance companies on human resource matters involving employee health and wellness since 1995. From 1989 until 1995, Dr. Parrotte was chief in charge of occupational health at Bath Iron Works (later acquired by General Dynamics). From 1982 to 1988, she was the on-site medical director at Polaroid Corporation. In addition to numerous certifications and licenses, Dr. Parrotte holds a an M.D. from the Boston University School of Medicine, a Masters in Public Health from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and a B.A. from Boston University. She also completed the Penn State Executive Program. Dr. Parrotte currently serves on the board of directors of Cognex Corporation, and is a member of the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Society.
'''William Tracy''' is the Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at Santa Fe Institute. His academic work lies at the intersection of complex systems and strategic management, with a focus on how boundedly-rational actors approach novel problems. Will comes to SFI from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was the undergraduate program director for the Lally School of Management and a faculty member. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and formerly served as the Associate Director of CSSS-Beijing, which was jointly administered by SFI and the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before entering academia, Will was a Junior Professional Associate at The World Bank, where he focused on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Will also has private sector and entrepreneurial experience in the US, China, and India. He holds a Ph.D. in management with a certificate in human complex systems from UCLA, and a BA (cum laude) in economics from Swarthmore College.
'''Olga Pierrakos''' currently serves as the founding chair of the Department of Engineering at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Previously, she also served as founding faculty at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA. Prior to coming to Wake Forest, she served as Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Undergraduate Education. Pierrakos conducts research in engineering education, cardiovascular fluid mechanics, and sustainable energy technologies.
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[[File:Mike.Price.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://santafe.edu/people/profile/mike-price '''Mike Price''']<br>Santa Fe Institute]]
'''Mike Price''' is interested in economic decision making in the broadest sense. This includes both conventional economic decisions, such as what toothpaste to buy or whether to borrow money to purchase a house, and less conventional economic decisions, such as whether to hunt for monitor lizards or kangaroos as a forager in Australia's Western Desert or whether to allocate scarce resources to current or future reproduction. Since our brains are, ultimately, the product of millions of years of evolution, Mike is currently exploring how evolutionary theory can be linked with economic theory to better understand human decision making. He hopes that this may lend insight into recent experimental work in behavioral economics that has uncovered systematic deviations between the predictions of standard economic models of rational choice and observed behavior. Although this behavior may seem irrational from the conventional economic perspective, it can nevertheless be very sensible if it leads to higher fitness for the decision maker.
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[[File:Michael-Richey.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-richey/ '''Michael Richey''']<br>The Boeing Company]]
'''Michael Richey''''s research portfolio is aligned to his corporate roles and responsibilities as a Boeing Associate Technical Fellow through: a) supporting the company’s business strategies by ensuring technical excellence across the enterprise in our people, technologies, processes, tools, and products, b) expanding the company technical skills and performance by improving the acquisition, retention, knowledge, and utilization of our technical workforce for business success and c) participating in representing the company’s technology interests to the outside world customers, the general public, academia, and government. His current research projects include engineering education, socio-technical systems, university online STEM programs, and educational data analytics. This multi-disciplinary research brings together expertise in the learning sciences, complexity science and social networking together with data in ways that can create an integrated understanding of system structure and behavior.
'''Mihail C. Roco''' is the founding chair of the US National Science and Technology Council subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET), and is Senior Advisor for Science and Engineering, including Nanotechnology, at the National Science Foundation. He is also the editor in chief of the Journal of Nanoparticle Research. He was declared engineer of the year in 1999 and 2004 by NSF and the U.S. National Society of Professional Engineers.
'''Jake Schwartz''' is Co-Founder and CEO of General Assembly, where he is responsible for guiding the organization’s global growth and expansion. Under his leadership, General Assembly has scaled to 14 cities in less than four years, and has helped more than 70,000 students create opportunities through educational programming in technology, business and design. General Assembly was recently voted Fast Company’s #1 Most Innovative Company in Education and #28 Most Innovative Company in the world. Prior to founding General Assembly, Jake worked for Associated Partners, a multi-stage private equity firm focused on telecommunications, media, and technology co-funded by Liberty Media and Goldman Sachs.
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[[File:Ben-Shapiro.png|thumb|180px|[http://benshapi.ro '''Ben Shapiro''']<br>University Of Colorado Boulder]]
'''Ben Shapiro''' is an Assistant Professor in the ATLAS Institute, the Department of Computer Science and, by courtesy, in the School of Education and the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research group, the Laboratory for Playful Computation, investigates how to enable kids from diverse backgrounds to learn computer science through collaborative, creative expression and through the design of networked technologies to solve problems in their homes and communities. He received his PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
'''George Siemens''' is an educator and researcher on learning, networks, analytics and visualization, openness, and organizational effectiveness in digital environments. He is the author of Knowing Knowledge, an exploration of how the context and characteristics of knowledge have changed and what it means to organizations today, and the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. Knowing Knowledge has been translated into Mandarin, Spanish, Persian, and Hungarian. Siemens is the Associate Director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University, leading the learning analytics research team. Previously, he was the Associate Director, Research and Development, with the Learning Technologies Centre at University of Manitoba.
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[[File:Constance-Steinkuehler.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://www.informatics.uci.edu/explore/faculty-profiles/constance-steinkuehler/ '''Constance Steinkuehler''']<br>University of California, Irvine]]
'''Constance Steinkuehler''' is a professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California–Irvine. As 21st century computer games blossom with possibilities, think of Steinkuehler as one of the people watering the digital garden. “I’m interested in games that improve cognitive well-being, especially among young people,” she says. Fascinated with the social dimensions of online play, Steinkuehler is exploring its convergence with cognitive processes to enhance mindfulness and mental well-being. “We’re developing games that promote learning, health, the self-regulation of attention, and the ability to recognize someone else’s feelings and to respond productively to them,” she explains. Previously, she was an Associate Professor in Digital Media at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-directed the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) center at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery.
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<div id="Elle-Yuan-Wang"></div>[[File:Elle-Yuan-Wang.png|thumb|180px|[https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/3193510 '''Elle Yuan Wang''']<br>Arizona State University]]
'''Elle Yuan Wang''' is a Research Scientist at ASU EdPlus Action Lab. Her current projects center on assessing social and emotional leaning skillsets and predicting learner longitudinal career development in large-scale online learning environments. Specifically, her projects take a comprehensive approach by linking three sources of learner data: pre-course learner motivation, within-course learner engagement, as well as post-course development. Measurement of post-course development reflects both individual learner career development as well as advancement of communities of practice. Her recent publications can be seen in Journal of Online Learning and Teaching and Journal of Learning Analytics. She obtained a Ph.D in Cognitive Sciences from Columbia University and has led various projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Previously, she has held fellowship and positions with Mayor Bloomberg’s Office in New York, the Office of the President at Columbia University, Columbia Technology Ventures, and MTV Networks.
'''Andy Watson''' is head of school at Albuquerque Academy, where he arrived after serving in teaching and administrative roles for a decade each at Fountain Valley School in Colorado and Potomac School in Northern Virginia. He earned his B.S from the Ohio State University and his M.S. from Yale, after which he started his teaching career at a public middle school in Dayton, Ohio. Along with his work on campus, he serves on the boards of the National Association of Independent Schools, the Global Online Academy, the Educational Records Bureau, and the advisory board of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and he previously served at a tri-chair of the Harvard Principals’ Center National Advisory Board.
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[[File:Samuel-Way.jpg|thumb|180px|[https://www.aa.edu/about/administration/head-of-school/ '''Samuel Way''']<br>University Of Colorado Boulder]]
'''Samuel Way''' focuses his research on applications of complex network analysis and machine learning to problems in the emerging field of computational social science, as well as biomedical research. His most recent work takes a systems-level approach to studying the scientific workforce, exploring factors that determine the composition and productivity of tenure-track faculty, including gender and the prestige of affiliated universities. In addition, Sam's research includes predicting health state variables from human microbiome samples and, separately, improving surgical procedures for treating heart rhythm disorders.
'''Jon Wilkins''' is a theoretical evolutionary biologist and poet, and founder and president of the Ronin Institute. His current interests span several different topics, including genomic imprinting, coalescent theory, statistical inference, and the origins of robustness and epistasis. Genomic imprinting is the phenomenon where the pattern of expression of an allele depends on its parental origin. Imprinted gene expression is thought to be the result of an intragenomic evolutionary conflict between matrilineal and patrilineal expression strategies. Jon is particularly interested in understanding the origin of such conflicts in the context of cognition and behavior, and in understanding the consequences of intragenomic conflict for phenotypic evolution at the level of the individual organism. Jon also works on coalescent theory, particularly the population genetics of geographically structured populations. He is also working to develop more general and powerful statistical methods for using genetic data to make inferences about demographic history and population structure. Jon’s third major area of research is on the evolution of robustness, and how patterns of robustness and epistasis are shaped by natural selection.
September 13, 2018
Co-hosted by Principal Financial Group
Des Moines, IA
Participants
James Evans University of Chicago & Santa Fe Institute
James Evans' research focuses on the collective system of thinking and knowing, ranging from the distribution of attention and intuition, the origin of ideas and shared habits of reasoning to processes of agreement (and dispute), accumulation of certainty (and doubt), and the texture—novelty, ambiguity, topology—of human understanding. James is especially interested in innovation—how new ideas and practices emerge—and the role that social and technical institutions (e.g., the Internet, markets, collaborations) play in collective cognition and discovery. Much of his work has focused on areas of modern science and technology, but he is also interested in other domains of knowledge—news, law, religion, gossip, hunches and historical modes of thinking and knowing. James supports the creation of novel observatories for human understanding and action through crowd sourcing, information extraction from text and images, and the use of distributed sensors (e.g., RFID tags, cell phones). He uses machine learning, generative modeling, social and semantic network representations to explore knowledge processes, scale up interpretive and field-methods, and create alternatives to current discovery regimes. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Templeton Foundation and other sources, and has been published in Science, American Journal of Sociology, Social Studies of Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, PLoS Computational Biology and other journals. His work has also been featured in Nature, the Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, NPR, BBC, El País, CNN and many other outlets.
At University of Chicago, James is the Director of Knowledge Lab, which has collaborative, granting and employment opportunities, as well as ongoing seminars. He also sponsors the Computational Social Science workshop (with John Brehm) and the Knowledge-Value workshop (with John Kelly) and co-organizes the Rational Choice workshop (with Gary Becker, Richard Posner & Glen Weyl). He teaches courses in the history of modern science, science studies, computational content analysis, and Internet and Society. Before Chicago, James received his doctorate in sociology from Stanford University, served as a research associate in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets group at Harvard Business School, started a private high school focused on project-based arts education, and completed a B. A. in Anthropology and Economics at Brigham Young University.
Chris Kempes generally focuses his work on biological architecture—which may include phenomena ranging from explicit biological morphology to metabolic and genetic network structure—as an intermediate between organism physiology and environmental conditions. Mathematical and physical theories lie at the heart of his methodologies to predict how evolution has shaped architecture and how this, in turn, forms a foundation for reliable predictions of environmental response and interaction. His work spans the scales of genetic information architecture to the morphology of microbial individuals and communities to the regional variation of plant traits and their feedback with climate and available resources. In so doing, he aims to connect these first-order trends to the limitations imposed by environments in order to predict specific evolutionary events and consequences. Several collaborations with experimentalists and theorists have led to models that inform experiments and assimilate empirical data in fields including single-cell experimental biology and forest dynamics.
David Krakauer is the President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. David’s 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.
Research projects includes work on the molecular logic of signaling pathways, the evolution of genome organization (redundancy, multiple encoding, quantization and compression), robust communication over networks, the evolution of distributed forms of biological information processing, dynamical memory systems, the logic of transmissible regulatory networks (such as virus life cycles) and the many ways in which organisms construct their environments (niche construction). Thinking about niche constructing niches provides us with a new perspective on the major evolutionary transitions.
Many of these areas are characterized by the need to encode heritable information (genetic, epigenetic, auto-catalytic or linguistic) at distinct levels of biological organization, where selection pressures are often independent or in conflict. Furthermore, components are noisy and degrade and interactions are typically diffusively coupled. At each level David asks how information is acquired, stored, transmitted, replicated, transformed and robustly encoded.
The big question that many are asking is what will evolutionary theory look like once it has become integrated with the sciences of adaptive information (information theory and computation), and of course, what will these sciences then look like?
Krakauer was previously chair of the faculty and a resident professor and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. A graduate of the University of London, where he went on to earn degrees in biology, and computer science. Dr. Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995. He remained at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow, and two years later was named a Wellcome Research Fellow in mathematical biology and lecturer at Pembroke College. In 1999, he accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and served as visiting professor of evolution at Princeton University. He moved on to the Santa Fe Institute as a professor three years later and was made faculty chair in 2009. Dr. Krakauer 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 Dr. Krakauer was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people "who will change the World."
David Krakauer also served as the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and was a Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Manfred Laubichler is a theoretical biologist and historian of science. His undergraduate training was in zoology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna (Austria) and his graduate training was in biology at Yale and in History/History of Science at Princeton. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and co-director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, an associate director of ASU's Origins Project, an adjunct scientist with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA, a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, Guest Professor at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, and on the external faculty of the KLI in Klosterneuburg, Austria. He is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the WIssenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Rajiv Sethi Santa Fe Institute and Columbia University
Rajiv Sethi is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research areas include microeconomics and game theory, with applications to prediction markets, communication, crime, and inequality. He is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy, and is a founding member of CORE (Curriculum Open-Access Resources for Economics), an organization dedicated to the production of high-quality resources for the teaching of economics, distributed free of charge worldwide under a Creative Commons license.
William Tracy is the Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at Santa Fe Institute. His academic work lies at the intersection of complex systems and strategic management, with a focus on how boundedly-rational actors approach novel problems. Will comes to SFI from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was the undergraduate program director for the Lally School of Management and a faculty member. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and formerly served as the Associate Director of CSSS-Beijing, which was jointly administered by SFI and the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before entering academia, Will was a Junior Professional Associate at The World Bank, where he focused on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Will also has private sector and entrepreneurial experience in the US, China, and India. He holds a Ph.D. in management with a certificate in human complex systems from UCLA, and a BA (cum laude) in economics from Swarthmore College.
