Alexander Siegenfeld
Bio
Updated 03/22/26Alexander (Alex) Siegenfeld is an independent researcher applying concepts and methods from statistical physics to understand complex social, political, and economic systems. He received a B.S. in physics and mathematics (2015) and a Ph.D. in physics (2022) from MIT, where he worked under Yaneer Bar-Yam at the New England Complex Systems Institute and the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. His doctoral research used multiscale analysis to identify leverage points for intervention in democratic elections, pandemics, and macroeconomic development, and his review article "An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications" (co-authored with Bar-Yam) was named Article of the Year 2020 by the journal Complexity. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute and has held visiting scholar positions including an ELLIIT scholar role in Sweden. In 2019, while a fifth-year PhD student, he received a $20,000 grant from the Long-Term Future Fund to conduct deconfusion research for AI safety, developing improved formalisms for analyzing complex systems at differing scales of abstraction; MIRI also offered him an internship based on this work. He won a gold medal at the 2010 International Chemistry Olympiad and is a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation fellow.
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