In 2022, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) established the Lou Schuyler Seed Grant Fund, an initiative created by donor Hank Schuyler in memory of his late wife. The fund provides up to $15,000 per project for SFI’s postdoctoral fellows and is designed to support exploratory research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Over the past four years, ten postdocs have received grants from this program. SFI’s external faculty are currently reviewing applications for the next group of recipients.
Kerice Doten-Snitker, a Complexity and EPE Postdoctoral Fellow at SFI, is using her 2025 grant to examine why some societies historically tolerated religious minorities more than others. She challenges the assumption that pluralism is solely tied to liberal values and instead explores political and economic influences by analyzing data from cities in the Holy Roman Empire between 1000 and 1700 C.E., a period marked by Jewish migration into western Europe. "Without the Lou Schuyler Grant, it would have been very difficult to find funding for this work because it falls between the lines of history and sociology," says Doten-Snitker.
Anna Clemencia Guerrero, another Complexity Fellow, is investigating how social norms influence biologists’ decisions when creating image data such as photomicrographs. She notes that scientists often unconsciously conform their methods to prevailing practices in their field. Guerrero used her grant funds to visit philosophers who qualitatively analyze images and historians who quantitatively analyze texts in order to integrate these approaches into her own work. "Those in-person visits were far more impactful than I could have imagined," she says. "I could tell that my hosts really, really appreciated that I’d come in person." Guerrero anticipates ongoing collaborations with researchers she met through these visits.
Yuanzhao Zhang, also a Complexity Fellow and one of the first grant recipients in 2022, focused his project on visualizing how artificial intelligence models interpret complex datasets. He explains: "As humans, we’re limited to visualizing information in only two or three dimensions." Zhang’s team developed tools enabling researchers to better understand how AI manipulates large amounts of data by representing them visually—using shapes like sinusoidal lines or branching trees—to illustrate model accuracy and variability.
Marina Dubova is using her grant to explore analogies within scientific reasoning. Working with collaborator Qiawen Liu from Princeton University, Dubova prompts scientists to connect unrelated objects or concepts—such as New York City or yoga poses—to their own research fields to inspire new ideas and theories. "But we don’t really know how analogies influence scientific reasoning or what kinds of analogies are most useful," Dubova says. She observes that participants frequently rank these analogy-driven ideas as highly novel: "Some people generate a lot of cool ideas!" The grant enabled Dubova both to compensate study participants and support Liu’s visit to SFI—a collaboration made possible by this funding.
The Lou Schuyler Seed Grant Fund continues its mission by fostering projects across disciplines among early-career scholars at SFI.
