Geoffrey West is fluent in the language of the Universe. He has harnessed the power of mathematics to tackle some of biology's most fundamental questions, which all too often go unnoticed by an academic community moving towards applied research in order to secure funding. (see CV)

Realizing, as a young boy sitting on the white cliffs of his native England, that he could easily determine the distance to the horizon using passing ships shaped his future study of physics. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, he found inspiration in a PhD assistantship at Stanford University in California. At Stanford, it was the collegial interactions with fellow classmates, rather than his instructors, that motivated him to continue in science. His time in California also paved the way for this theoretical physicist to cross disciplinary boundaries.

In his spare time, West began to contemplate the biological process of ageing and to work on a way of quantifying what keeps organisms alive. His growing interest in biology led him to the friendly, open atmosphere of New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory, which had a history of interdisciplinary work. In 1992, the proposed Superconducting Super Collider project he'd been involved with for years was scrapped, prompting him to do more than just dabble in biology. And an opportune encounter with a biologist helped him make that transition.

Mike Simmons, then vice-president of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private, independent institute in New Mexico, introduced West to Jim Brown, an ecologist at the University of New Mexico who was looking to collaborate with a physicist. “I was speaking Latin and he was speaking Greek,” West says of their meetings. It took a year of work to get past the jargon, reach across their scientific disciplines and publish a seminal paper in Nature detailing some of the laws that dictate an organism's metabolic rate.

“People don't realize you need to create an atmosphere in which researchers are willing to ask elementary questions without feeling defensive or vulnerable,” West says.

Last year, West moved to the SFI. As its newly elected president, he will now be able to foster the environment he hoped to find as a college student — one that emphasizes big-picture science. “One of the great ironies is that despite talk of interdisciplinary research, it remains to be realized at the grassroots level,” says West.

He hopes the SFI will continue to fill that void, providing a haven for researchers to explore without boundaries.