QBioS - Postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute

Congratulations to Quantitative Biosciences PhD alumni, Pedro Marquez-Zacarias and Daniel Muratore. Both Pedro and Daniel were selected for Omidyar Fellowships at the Santa Fe Institute, which was awarded to four postdoctoral fellows this year. These are Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships, which offer early-career scholars the opportunity to undertake their own interdisciplinary research during their three-year residencies at the Santa Fe Institute.

Pedro's research at the Santa Fe Institute will "apply principles of category theory and compositionality to different aspects of biology, such as the study of life cycles, the notion of biological autonomy, and the major evolutionary transitions. He will also study the evolution of language, focusing on his mother tongue, Purépecha, which is a language isolate within the Mesoamerican languages."

Daniel's research examines "how marine microbial ecosystems drive massive global fluxes of carbon and other elements between the atmosphere and the deep sea via an effect deemed the 'biological pump', and what roles viral infection might take in changing the quantity and efficiency of the biological pump in a changing ocean. Daniel’s research integrates nonlinear dynamical modeling with bioinformatics and statistics to synthesize oceanographic observations collected at sea in a complexity framework."