Trained as a theoretical physicist, Geoffrey West has turned his analytical mind toward the inner workings of more concrete things, like . . . animals. In a paper for Science in 1997, he and his team uncovered what he sees as a surprisingly universal law of biology—how heart rate, size and energy consumption are related, consistently, across most living animals.

Time magazine listed him in its list of “100 Most Influential People in the World”.

Harvard Business Review named his work on cities and companies was selected as a breakthrough idea of 2007.

West searches for “simplicity underlying complexity” and the unifying principles that can lead to a quantitative, predictive, integrated framework for understanding complex adaptive systems ranging from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and the challenges of sustainability.

His primary interests include fundamental questions in physics and biology, ranging from the elementary particles (quarks, gluons, strings, etc) and cosmology to universal scaling laws and quantifying diverse questions in biology. His biology research included metabolic rate, growth, aging & mortality, sleep, cancer, and ecosystem structure and dynamics.

He speaks worldwide, including at TED. Among recent awards are the Mercer Prize from the Ecological Society of America, the Weldon Prize for Mathematical Biology, the Glenn Award for Aging research and the Leo Szilard Award from the American Physical Society.

He wrote several books, including the #1 bestselling Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has been featured in The New York Times, Nature, Science, The Financial Times, Wired and Scientific American, as well as Nova, the National Geographic and the BBC.

Geoffrey West received his BA from Cambridge University in 1961 and his PhD in physics from Stanford University in 1966. After spells at Cornell and Harvard Universities, he returned to Stanford in 1970 to join the faculty. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in 2003, he was the founding leader of the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he remains a Senior Fellow. He was President of SFI from 2005-09.