Eddie Lee
Assistant Professor · Principal Investigator
Eddie studies the relation between the small and large living patterns around us. Examples range
from the how individual neurons constrain collective outcomes to how the fractal nature of a tree
matters for forest ecology, to how we combine local conflict events into patterns of armed conflict,
and to how local paths affect innovation and obsolescence in society. He is fascinated by how we
paint those patterns on the shared canvas of mathematics and what the resulting similarities between
the mathematical representations reveal about them. Do similarities reflect analogous function,
universal dynamics, or are they (simply) artifacts of our representation? His work aims to answer
these overarching questions that come together from the standpoint of information, energetics, and
scales.
He is an Assistant Professor in Physics and Astronomy and at
the Center for Theoretical Physics at Seoul National University
and Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub. Previously, he was an Austrian Science Fund ESPRIT
Fellow at the Complexity Science Hub and a Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He has
a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cornell University—where he received a National Science Foundation
Graduate Research Fellowship—and a BA in Physics from Princeton University. He has been invited to
panels on the science of violence (Santa Fe Council on Int’l Relations) and on the physics of the 2021
and 2024 Nobel Prizes as well as an invited lecturer to the German Physical Society, LSE, King's
College, and the universities including Amsterdam, Potsdam, Northwestern, Oxford, and Bristol. He is an
Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Social Computing.
