Santa Fe Institute (SFI)

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit research and education centre for complex systems science, on its Cowan Campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico.¹ It was founded in 1984, the first research institute devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems.¹ Complex systems, in SFI's words, are ones in which many agents interact and adapt to one another and to their surroundings; its examples include ecosystems, economies and cities.¹

The institute grew out of weekly discussions that the Los Alamos chemist George Cowan held with senior colleagues at the laboratory from 1982. The physicist David Pines joined in early 1983 and brought in Murray Gell-Mann.² The group incorporated the institute in May 1984 as the Rio Grande Institute and renamed it once Cowan bought the name Santa Fe Institute from a local treatment centre. Two founding workshops, "Emerging Syntheses in Science", followed in late October and early November 1984.²

SFI lists the areas where its methods have had most impact. Agent-based modelling, which simulates many interacting individuals, is one, applied to pandemics, economics and conflict. Scaling theory, applied among other things to urban growth, is another. The list also names ecological stability and resilience, and cities and urbanisation.¹ On this site, SFI hosted the 2026 working group on digital twins of complex systems and published a report on it; its lectures are on YouTube.

For someone building a model of a place, SFI's most direct offer is Complexity Explorer, its online school. Ginger Richardson and Melanie Mitchell began planning it in 2010, it launched in 2011 with support from the John Templeton Foundation, and its first course ran in early 2013.³ All of its content is free, and SFI says it has reached over 90,000 users since 2013.⁴ Courses, tutorials and lectures cover agent-based modelling, fractals and scaling, game theory, information theory, nonlinear dynamics and machine learning.^4,5 Among them is a tutorial on building agent-based models in Python with Mesa, taught by the Mesa project.⁵ Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling runs as a scheduled course; its Summer 2026 session, taught by Anamaria Berea, ran from May to August.⁵