Geoffrey West

Geoffrey West is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he formerly served as president. He is also an associate fellow of Oxford University’s Said Business School and a senior fellow at Los Alamos, where he was leader of high-energy physics. His B.A. is from Cambridge and his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford. After Cornell and Harvard, he joined the faculty at Stanford.

Geoffrey’s primary interests are in fundamental questions, including elementary particles, universal scaling laws in biology and a quantitative theory for cities, companies, and long-term global sustainability. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging and death, sleep, cancer, ecosystems, innovation, the accelerating pace of life, and why companies die, yet cities survive. He lectures worldwide and has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, the Economist, the Financial Times, Wired, and Scientific American. He has been on Nova, National Geographic, and the BBC.

Geoffrey’s awards include the Mercer Prize from the Ecological Society of America, the Weldon Memorial Prize for Mathematical Biology, the Glenn Award for Aging Research, and the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award from the American Physical Society. His work was selected as a breakthrough idea by Harvard Business Review and, in 2006, he was on Time magazine’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.”