President and Distinguished Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Time Magazine “100 Most Influential People in the World”
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications.
Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he was the leader, and founder, of the high-energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is one of only approximately ten Senior Fellows. In 2006 Dr. West was named as one of Time magazine's"100 Most Influential People in the World."
His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. This led to the development of realistic quantitative models for the structural and functional design of organisms based on underlying universal principles. This work, begun at the Institute, has received much attention in both the scientific and popular press, and provides a framework for quantitative analyses of problems ranging from fundamental issues in biology (such as cell size, growth, metabolic rate, DNA nucleotide substitution rates, and the structure and dynamics of ecosystems) to questions at the forefront of medical research (such as aging, sleep, and cancer). Among his current interests is the extension of these ideas to understand quantitatively the structure and dynamics of social organizations, such as cities and corporations, and the relationships between efficiency and innovation.
A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he was one of their Centenary Speakers in 2003. He has been a lecturer in many distinguished scientist series, including being the Ulam Lecturer in 2001 and a National Science Foundation distinguished lecturer in 2007. Among other recent honors he was a co-receiver of the Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America, and the Weldon Memorial Prize (2005), Oxford University. He is the author of several books and an editor of Comments in Theoretical Biology. He was recently a visiting Professor and Fellow at Imperial College, London, and at Oxford University. In addition to being a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos, he is a Research Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico.
West received his BA from Cambridge University in 1961 and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1966, where he returned in 1970 to become a member of the faculty. He was named SFI President in July 2005. West is married to Jacqueline West, a psychologist in private practice; they have two children: Joshua, a geologist at Oxford University and an Olympic rower, and Devorah, who recently received her undergraduate degree in Sociology from Brown University.
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