Professor Geoffrey West

Professor Geoffrey West was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow of Green Templeton College.

West is Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute. His BA is from Cambridge and PhD from Stanford where he was later on the faculty. For many years he ran high energy physics at Los Alamos. West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions ranging from the elementary particles and their cosmological implications to universal scaling laws in biology and developing a quantitative science of cities, companies and global sustainability. His work is motivated by the search for unifying principles and the “simplicity underlying complexity”. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging & lifespan, sleep, cancer, ecosystems, the dynamics of cities and companies, rates of growth and innovation, and the accelerating pace of life.

West has lectured worldwide including Davos and TED; in 2018 he gave the Simonyi lecture at Oxford. He has been featured in many publications including The Times, New York Times, Financial Times, Time, The Economist and Scientific American and participated in television productions including Nova, National Geographic and the BBC. He serves on the Council of the World Economic Forum and recently published the best-selling book Scale. His work was selected as a breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review in 2006, and in 2007 he was on Time magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People in the World”.