A graduate of the University of London, where he went on to earn a master’s degree in computer science and mathematics, David Krakauer received his D.Phil. in evolutionary theory from Oxford University in 1995. He remained at Oxford as a postdoctoral research fellow and two years later was named a Wellcome Research Fellow in mathematical biology and lecturer at Pembroke College. In 1999, he accepted an appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and served as visiting professor of evolution. He moved on to the Santa Fe Institute as a professor three years later and was made faculty chair in 2009. Krakauer has been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as well as by the Packard Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation, the Kent School of Intelligence Analysis, the Templeton Foundation, Lockheed Martin and several family foundations and trusts. A member of the editorial boards of the journals Theoretical Biology, Theory in Biosciences, Biology Digest, Interdisciplinary Science Review, Springer’s Monographs in Mathematical Biology, and Primers in Complex Systems, a series published by the SFI and Princeton University Press, he is the author of more than 100 papers published in scientific journals and the co-editor of Protocells: Transitions from Non-living to Living Matter, an account of current approaches to synthesizing new forms of life in the laboratory, which was published in 2008 by MIT Press. He is completing two new books, Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth, and Robustness, Causal Networks and Experimental Design with Princeton University Press.
Krakauer has worked collaboratively with several business partners including Google, Boeing, Fidelity and Intel. In 2012, he was included in Wired UK’s “Smart List” as one of 50 people who will change the world.