Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell attended Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry, where she majored in mathematics and did research in astronomy.⁠[1]

She has recalled spending a year after college as a volunteer in the peace movement in Northern Ireland and then teaching high school math in New York; after reading Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” she decided to become an AI researcher, though she had never taken a computer science class.⁠[2]

She then moved to Boston to do computer work at a HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry astronomy lab; reaching Hofstadter by phone at 10 p.m., she won a summer internship and followed him to the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry for graduate school.⁠[2]

She worked closely with Hofstadter for six years on Copycat, a program designed to “discover insightful analogies, and to do so in a psychologically realistic way.”⁠[3]

She received a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1990.⁠[4]

From 1992 to 1999 she was a research professor at the Santa Fe Institute and director of its Adaptive Computation Program, later working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute, and taught at the OGI School of Science and Engineering from 2002 to 2004.⁠[5]

Her “Complexity: A Guided Tour” (Oxford, 2009) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, was named by Amazon.comAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry one of the ten best science books of 2009 and was longlisted for the Royal Society’s 2010 book prize.⁠[1]

In 2010 she and Santa Fe Institute education vice president Ginger Richardson began planning an online course; the Complexity Explorer project launched in 2011 with John Templeton Foundation support, and its first course, her “Introduction to Complexity,” opened in early 2013, drawing more than 7,000 students in its first year.⁠[6]

In 2019 she published “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans” with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.⁠[7]

The book was named one of the five best books on AI by both the New York Times and the Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

As a professor of computer science at Portland State University and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, she spoke at MIT CSAIL on the limitations and vulnerabilities of AI systems that stem from a lack of true understanding.⁠[9]

She appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing strong versus weak AI, complex systems and intelligence, the Copycat cognitive architecture, concepts and analogies, deep learning, autonomous vehicles, fears of superintelligence, the Santa Fe Institute and Hofstadter.⁠[10]

As Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, she led its Foundations of Intelligence in Natural and Artificial Systems project, a workshop series on how biological evolution, collective behavior and a physical body contribute to intelligence; she holds that machines must make good analogies before approaching humanlike intelligence.⁠[3]

With David C. Krakauer she wrote “The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models,” surveying the debate over whether large language models can be said to understand language and calling for a new science of intelligence that distinguishes modes of understanding; it appeared in PNAS in 2023.⁠[11]

“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans” was shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing.⁠[7]

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that she had joined its Science and Security Board; she said now is a time of “many novel and unique risks to humanity” and hoped to help improve understanding of them, especially for AI.⁠[4]

She also writes a quarterly column for Science and a Substack newsletter on AI.⁠[4]

She gave the keynote “The Past, Present, and Uncertain Future of Artificial Intelligence” at Middlebury College’s Clifford Symposium 2025, examining how current AI works, how intelligent it truly is and its prospects.⁠[12]

The National Academies announced the 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications, naming her top prize winner in the later-career research scientist category for her Science columns and the Santa Fe Institute podcast “The Nature of Intelligence.”⁠[13]

She has been a professor at the Santa Fe Institute since 2020.⁠[5]

Personal website: Public link: https://melaniemitchell.me/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/melmitchell1 (opens in a new window)⁠[9]

Santa Fe Institute: Official website: https://www.santafe.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]