Affiliated Faculty and Collaborators
UC Santa Cruz
EFI Executive Committee at UCSC
Sandra Faber (Astronomy), Director of EFI. Faber’s specialties are galaxy formation and astronomical instrumentation. With Primack, she is a co-author of the Cold Dark Matter theory, the standard paradigm for the formation of structure in the Universe. She is interested in how galaxies make planets and whether Earth is rare. Her foci in EFI are the need for an ethical framework as a prerequisite for planning Earth’s future and whether human beings already possess the beginnings of that framework. She is also interested in the role that computer-mediated pedagogy can play in shaping humanity’s values about the future.
Nancy Abrams (advisor and consultant) is a philosopher of science, lawyer, and author. While working in the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, she invented Scientific Mediation, a method that helps government agencies make the wisest policy decision possible in the face of scientific uncertainty. With husband Joel Primack, she wrote two acclaimed books on cosmology and culture and has lectured extensively on that topic. Her most recent book, A God That Could be Real, is a reflection on the human construct of the divine. Her focus within EFI is marrying scientific and ethical truth to create a viable vision for Earth’s future.
Anthony Aguirre (Physics) studies the formation and evolution of the Universe, focusing on eternal inflation and what it means for the beginning of the Universe and time. He is co-founder and associate scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, which supports research on questions at the frontiers of physics and cosmology, and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, an organization aiming to increase the probability that life has a future. A major interest in EFI is the impact of future technologies on quality of life.
Natalie Batalha (Astronomy). Prior to joining UC Santa Cruz, Batalha was Co-Investigator and Mission Scientist on the Kepler Mission, which found over 4,000 exoplanets. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system. Batalha has received many awards, including being named in 2017 to Time magazine’s list of the “100 most influential people in the world.” Currently, Batalha heads the new Astrobiology Institute at UC Santa Cruz. She is particularly interested in the ethics of space travel and exploration.
David Deamer (Biomolecular Engineering). Deamer’s research interests include the transport of DNA through pores in membranes and the development of nanopore technology for sequencing DNA. A second major interest is the process by which nucleic acids first emerged on the early Earth prior to the origin of cellular life. His most recent book, Assembling Life, challenges orthodoxy by arguing that life began on Earth, not in the oceans as commonly held, but in fresh-water hot springs and with a different set of chemical reactions.
Jon Ellis (Philosophy) studies the philosophy of psychology, epistemology, and the ethics of belief. A particular focus is motivated reasoning — including confirmation bias and rationalization — and their social and ethical implications. Ellis is the founding director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Public Philosophy, which aims to foster effective dialogue and deliberation on contentious issues by the general public. CPP is a regional host for the National High Schools Ethics Bowls, a growing nationwide movement to promote rigorous but respectful analyses of difficult ethical issues by high school students.
Daniel Friedman (Economics) has broad research interests in applied economic theory with emphasis on learning and evolution, game theory, experimental economics, decision theory and behavioral economics. He founded the laboratory for Learning and Experimental Economics Projects (LEEPS), which studies learning processes in the laboratory as a key to understanding economic behavior. His popular book Morals and Markets explores the intimate connection between a society’s economics and the moral values it holds.
David Haussler (Biomolecular Engineering) is a bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the Human Genome Project, and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that has deepened our understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and founder and director of the Genomics Institute at UC Santa Cruz. His major interest in EFI is the ethical applications of genomic engineering and other gene technologies.
Joel Primack (Physics) is one of the founders of the Cold Dark Matter theory, the standard paradigm for galaxy and structure formation in the Universe. His numerous contributions to the role of science in government and policy-making include his role in founding the AAAS Science Congressional Fellows program and the Union of Concerned Scientists, and adviser to and participant in the Science and the Spiritual Quest project. With Nancy Abrams, he co-authored two widely acclaimed popular books on cosmology and culture.
Edward Shanken (Digitial Arts and New Media) is an American art historian who writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. His recent scholarship addresses art-science collaboration, surveillance culture, sound art and ecology, systems theory, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art. He thinks of art as a “psychic dress rehearsal for the future” and is especially interested in how artists create models that allow us to sample alternative futures in the present. His scholarship has been translated into six languages.
Collaborating UCSC Faculty:
David Koo (Astronomy) is an observational astronomer who studies cosmology and galaxy formation. One of the inventors of photometric redshifts, he has led the execution of several landmark distant-Universe surveys including the DEEP redshift surveys on Keck 2 and the CANDELS survey on Hubble. He co-founded “La Noche de las Estrellas” for local Spanish-speaking high school students at Lick Observatory and is working to expand it to include a long-term mentoring component.
Judit Moschkovich (Education) studies the integration of language into mathematics cognition and learning. Special areas of focus are the mathematics education of Latinos/as students and supporting English Language Learners to meet the Common Core State Standards. A member of numerous advisory committees and editorial boards, she was named a 2018 Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and received their Distinguished Scholar Award in 2019.
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz (Astronomy) studies the violent Universe with an emphasis on stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts, and processes that govern accretion onto relativistic objects such as black holes and neutron stars. He is the inaugural holder of the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair for Diversity in Astronomy and has worked vigorously to support the promotion and retention of women and people from under-represented groups in astronomy and related fields.
Barbara Rogoff (Psychology) studies cultural variation in learning processes and settings with a special focus on communities where schooling is not prevalent. She investigates cultural aspects of children’s learning, finding especially sophisticated collaboration and attention among children from indigenous communities of the Americas. The recipient of numerous honors, she now heads a new collaborative at UCSC called Advancing Learning Sciences for a New Generation (ALSiNG).
National and International Collaborators
Brad Necyk is a multimedia artist and writer in Canada whose practice engages with medicine, mental health, and precarious populations and subjects. His current research focuses on climate change and consciousness through witnessing and storytelling. His works include drawings and paintings, photography, video, 3D imaging, virtual reality, and performance. He recently completed a research-creation PhD in Psychiatry at the University of Alberta and was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal.
Richard Nolthenius is chair of the Department of Astronomy at neighboring Cabrillo College, and has been a visiting researcher and lecturer at UCSC Astronomy, working with Joel Primack and Sandra Faber on how galaxy clustering can test Dark Matter models, and on the fundamental plane defined in dissipative stellar systems. He’s also been active in observational work on asteroid morphology, and was part of the NASA ground team for the Hayabusa Mission in Australia. His focus for the past 12 years has been climate change and civilization as a thermodynamic system, and the connections between energy, economics, and the conflicts between our biological motivational programming and future life on a finite planet. He is co-author of the 2019 Amazon best-seller “Climate Abandoned”, is frequent co-host of the syndicated radio program “Be Bold, America” with Jill Cody. He continues to advance the research into the observed close proportionality between global primary energy consumption and the sum total of global spending over all human history, and how it constrains strategies for climate mitigation. More information here.