Leonardo Governing Board Elects New Member Jim Crutchfield

The Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board welcomes Jim Crutchfield as its newest member. Jim was elected to the board at the October 2009 meeting.

Jim Crutchfield teaches nonlinear physics at the University of California, Davis, directs its Complexity Sciences Center, and promotes science interventions in nonscientific settings. He's mostly concerned with what patterns are, how they are created, and how intelligent agents discover them; see http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~chaos.

Prior to UC Davis, Crutchfield was Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he led its Dynamics of Learning Group and Network Dynamics Program. Before this, he was a Research Physicist in the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in Physics and Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Physics there in 1983. He has been a Visiting Research Professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco; a Post-doctoral Fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UCB; an IBM Post-Doctoral Fellow in Condensed Matter Physics; a Distinguished Visiting Research Professor of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and a Bernard Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Over the last three decades Crutchfield has worked in the areas of nonlinear dynamics, solid-state physics, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, critical phenomena and phase transitions, chaos, and pattern formation. His current research interests center on the physics of information and computation, statistical inference for nonlinear processes, evolutionary theory, quantum dynamics, distributed intelligence, and global sustainability. He has published over 100 papers in these areas.

Crutchfield was Scientific Director of a major NSF-funded science museum exhibit series on pattern formation and complex systems--- "Turbulent Landscapes: The Forces that Shape Our World" which opened at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1996. The exhibition toured the nation's science museums until 2003 and then was shown at the British Museum in London.

He is co-founder, Vice President, and Scientific Director of the Art and Science Laboratory, Santa Fe, New Mexico, a nonprofit research center that supports collaborations between artists and scientists working in the computing arts.

Collaborating with composer David Dunn, Crutchfield continually re- develops the "Theater of Pattern Formation"---an interactive performance work that explores the benefits and costs of emergent organization.

Updated 7 October 2009