The Synthesi Institute funds and houses researchers working at the seams between disciplines — the questions that fall through the cracks of any single department.
Founded in 2011, the Institute began as a single seminar room shared by three professors who could not get funding anywhere else — their work did not fit neatly into biology, computer science, or philosophy alone.
Today the Institute hosts resident fellows for twelve to twenty-four months, pairing them across disciplines on problems chosen for their difficulty, not their fundability. Fellows publish independently, but the Institute's seminars, shared datasets, and long lunches are where the real synthesis happens.
We are a nonprofit, privately funded, and editorially independent of any university, government, or corporate sponsor.
A biologist and a computer scientist studying how simple local rules produce complex collective behavior in animal groups and networks.
Philosophers and statisticians examining what obligations follow when a model's prediction changes someone's life outcome.
Linguists and archaeologists reconstructing how oral traditions encoded technical knowledge before written records.
"I spent eighteen months talking to people who disagreed with my assumptions on purpose. It's the only reason the model works now."