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Complex Systems Center
Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman

College of Medicine, Biochemistry
CEMS, Department of Mathematics & Statistics

Curruculum Vitae

To see Stuart Kauffman's CV, click here.

Blog

13.7: Cosmos and Culture
Follow Stuart Kauffman and others on this National Public Radio (NPR) blog where science and the domains of human culture, spirituality and imaginative capacity speak to each other, addressing the extraordinary and pressing issues we face in this new century.

Posts of Interest

Research Interests

  • Development of an inference algorithm, IADGRIN, to infer the structure and logic of noisy Boolean networks
  • Foundational work on the linkages among work, constraint, information, in the propagating organization occurring in cells in the biosphere
  • Initial investigations on the relation between maximizing mutual information in Boolean networks and the dynamical criticality of such networks
  • Developed early plans on extending IADGRIN to chemical master equation (Gillespie) network models of genetic regulatory networks
  • Construction and implementation of Gillespie networks and study of bi-stable toggle switches and the three gene "represselator"
  • Formulation of a general ensemble approach to use Gillespie nets to model genetic regulatory nets and construction of initial models

Current Publications and Lectures

Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

Stuart Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology. more

See also:

Biography

Dr. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University in 1963, and completed a medical degree (M.D.) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987-1992.

Kauffman rose to prominence through his association with the Santa Fe Institute (a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems), where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997 and where he continues to be an external professor. He is also well known for his work on models in various areas of biology, including autocatalytic sets in origin of life research, gene regulatory networks in developmental biology, and fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology. Kauffman holds the founding broad biotechnology patents in combinatorial chemistry and applied molecular evolution.

In 1996 Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe-based, for-profit company that employed complex systems methodology to attempt to solve business problems. BiosGroup was acquired by NuTech Solutions in early 2003. NuTech was bought by Netezza in 2008.

From 2004 to 2009 Kauffman held a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in Biological Sciences and Physics and Astronomy. He was also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He was an iCORE (Informatics Research Circle of Excellence) chair and the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics from February 2005 to January 2010.

In January of 2009 Kauffman became a Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing. The appointment is until the end of 2012. The subject of the FiDiPro research project is the development of delayed stochastic models of genetic regulatory networks based on gene expression data at the single molecule level.

In January of 2010 Kauffman joined the University of Vermont faculty where he is continuing his work with UVM's Complex Systems Center.

Open Faculty Positions
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