ISAL is electing six new members to its board of directors, to replace the current directors whose terms are expiring. 12 society members are standing for election, as listed below.
All society members will shortly be contacted with further information regarding the election date and voting procedure.
ISAL Board Elections 2025: Candidate Statements
ISAL is electing six new members to its board of directors, to replace the current directors whose terms are expiring. 12 society members are standing for election, as listed below. Follow the links for each candidate’s election statement.
All society members will shortly be contacted with further information regarding the election date and voting procedure.
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Arend Hintze
Background
I have been curious about Artificial Life for as long as I can remember, fascinated by the possibility of studying life and evolution not only in nature but also in silico and in theory. After completing my PhD in Biology, I was excited to join the ALife community, attending my first conference in 2007 and finding a scientific home that connected my interests in evolution, cognition, and complexity. Since then, I have developed models such as Markov Brains and contributed to understanding modularity, robustness, and the genotype–phenotype map. In 2019, I was honored with the ISAL Junior Scientist Award. Today, I am a full professor at Dalarna University in Sweden, continuing to explore how Artificial Life can bridge biology and AI in addressing fundamental questions about life and intelligence.
Statement of Goals
If elected to the ISAL Board, I would focus on two priorities. First, I believe the ALIFE conference and journal review process can be improved by fostering constructive, transparent, and fair reviews that both strengthen the science and support our community. Second, I see an urgent need to broaden how we think about life. While ALife has long been dedicated to “life as it could be,” society now encounters artificial agents—especially large language models—that may not be alive in the biological sense, yet are increasingly treated as if they were. I believe our community is uniquely positioned to address not only what life is, but also what it means for humans to interact with entities that act, and are perceived, as living systems.
Omer Markovitch
Background
I am a theoretical chemist on the border between chemistry, biology, and artificial life. Currently I am a CEEC long-term fellow at the Institute Superior Técnico in Portugal. I have had the pleasure of participating in many of the ALife meetings and workshops since my PhD, which have helped to shape my research path. What I like about this field and our community is that despite its broadness we are always trying to find common grounds and to bridge different disciplines and welcoming new people and ideas. I have adopted this spirit of openness and collaboration into my own research.
Statement of Goals
I am committed to further supporting ISAL’s core activities, particularly in promoting diversity, engagement, and accessibility.
In addition, I aim to strengthen our connection and foster greater synergy with national societies as well as with tangent international communities.
Furthermore, I also see an opportunity for us, as a community, to benefit from the boom in accessible advanced technologies the world is experiencing in order to make ALife research even more tangible and accessible.
All of these will augment the general perception of science in general and ALife’s impact in specific.
Stefano Nichele
Background
I am a Professor at the Østfold University College (Norway) and an adjunct Professor at the Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway). My research lab, informally known as Living Technology Lab (https://www.nichele.eu/), works at the intersection of Artificial Life, Complex Systems, and Artificial Intelligence. I am also the chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems and the recipient of the ISAL Distinguished Early Career Investigator Award 2024. Recently, I have been working in ALife projects that use diverse self-organizing substrates for computation. Examples include in-vitro neurons, water, carbon nanotubes and other physical materials, voxel-based soft robots, cellular automata, and Neural CA.
Statement of Goals
If elected, my priorities will be:
- Organize ALife workshops in major AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS; ICLR, ICML) to facilitate cross-fertilization
- Serve as an ISAL liaison with the IEEE Task Force on Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems for better coordination and joint initiatives
- Establish a network/ecosystem for collaboration among ALife startup companies
- Consolidate / restart initiatives such as ALife competitions, Podcast, summer school
- Continue supporting ongoing ISAL initiatives with enthusiasm 😊
Anya E Vostinar
Background
I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Carleton College, where I lead the SymbuLab, which uses Artificial Life to investigate the evolution of symbiosis. I have served on the ISAL Board of Directors as the Diversity Chair and chair of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee since 2021. During that time, I led the committee in drafting the new Code of Conduct and Mission Statement that have now been adopted by ISAL, as well as several other efforts, detailed on the DEI committee page (https://alife.org/dei-committee/).
For my research, I maintain the a-life platform Symbulation. I publish in venues ranging from GECCO and ALIFE conferences to the Artificial Life journal and biology journals. I believe artificial life is an invaluable field for undergraduate education and public understanding and acceptance of biological dynamics, as well as many other things.
Statement of Goals
I would use my position on the board to continue my work in inclusivity and education with the artificial life community and beyond. If elected, my priorities will be:
- Continue working to make ISAL as welcoming a community as possible, including by serving on the DEI committee and working to make sure newer community members are supported.
- Continue expanding on ISAL’s online materials, such as the Encyclopedia of Artificial Life and indexes of reputable external resources.
- Expand the existing lesson repository (and promote its existence) to include the many example a-life education resources that are out there and work with the community to identify gaps and needs.
I’ll also be delighted to serve in whatever other capacities are needed to support this wonderful community.
Eleni Nisioti
Background
I am a post-doctoral researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, working within the artificial life group led by Sebastian Risi. I am also an external collaborator of the Inria team led by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, where I have belonged to in the past and have found an amazing blend of artificial life, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I am interested in the mechanics of adaptation: I design simulation environments and learning algorithms (evolution and reinforcement learning primarily), focusing my studies on the role that diversity can play in continual adaptation. My motivation primarily lies in understanding mechanisms supporting biological and cultural evolution through modelling. More recently I also got fascinated by the potential of using our methods as tools in the real world (I think applications can offer useful constraints and questions) and am now exploring the potential of our neuro-evolution algorithms for evolvable hardware.
Statement of Goals
It has been seventy years since cyberneticists like Rosh Ashby communicated about empirical epistemology, the art of knowing through building, and, judging from my interactions with traditional academia, it seems that computational modelling is still often met with suspicion. After working some years in alife, I feel a need to explore the path from artificial to natural life (the life-as-it-is path): our models should not stay at the level of inspiration but offer hypotheses for the natural systems that inspired them. I see the challenge in this and how it would require appropriate communication, inter-disciplinary work and a nose for finding the right application. This year I’ve been organising events to communicate ideas from alife to other communities (a workshop at GECCO, a potential workshop at an AI conference and a winter school). I’d be up for any role that entails communication, archiving and outreach (I’m keen on blogging and the history of science).
James Stovold
Background
I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Lancaster University Leipzig, with research interests that centre around emergent behaviour, artificial life, and unconventional computing. I have had an atypical academic career, having started on the teaching track before switching in the last year or so to the research track. I think it is safe to say that I’ve found my academic home in the ALife community and have been slowly bringing other like-minded academics into the fold for the past couple of years.
In terms of involvement, I first attended ALIFE in New York in 2014, I have attended every year since the 2022 online edition, and I currently sit on the ISAL DEI subcommittee.
Statement of Goals
As I started my career on the teaching track, I am naturally drawn towards educational activities. While there are many examples of good practice and some excellent resources available, I believe that ISAL should be the point of reference for a newcomer to find these—possibly via a subdomain on the website, or through the encyclopaedia.
Compiling a repository of materials in this manner would help anybody who is developing learning materials for a new module/programme to include relevant ALife-related content from a trusted source.
While many of us have a tendency to focus on university teaching, this could also be extended to teaching at all levels, along the lines of the CS Unplugged and CS Field Guide.
By lowering this barrier to entry, we can develop a healthy pipeline of students with exposure to ALife concepts, increasing awareness both in academic circles and in industry, and helping to spread the good news that the world doesn’t revolve around LLMs!
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Background
I earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and am currently Professor in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and Visiting Professor of Mathematical and Evolutionary Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. For more than three decades, I have been active in Artificial Life research, teaching, and mentoring. My work spans algebraic automata theory, complex adaptive systems, developmental systems, the evolution of multicellularity, language, and enactive intelligence, as well as human-robot interaction. I have long been engaged with the ALife community as an author, editor, organizer, and educator. I developed and taught Artificial Life courses at the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Aizu, supporting degree routes in AI, AI with Robotics, and Biomedical Engineering. With Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, we are preparing the forthcoming book Artificial Life Fundamentals. I am also serving as the Main Organizer of ALIFE 2026 in Waterloo.
Statement of Goals
If elected to the ISAL board, I will work to strengthen the Society’s role as a global hub for Artificial Life by fostering both intellectual rigor and creative exploration. As Main Organizer of ALIFE 2026, whose theme is “Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems”, I aim to highlight rigorous mathematical connections within ALife research while also empowering artistic and philosophical perspectives that enrich our understanding of “life as-it-could-be.” I believe it is especially important to create opportunities for students and early-career researchers to engage in these dialogues, as their voices will shape the future of the field. Building on decades of experience teaching and mentoring, I will advocate for expanded educational resources and inclusive participation across disciplines, regions, and career stages. My goal is for ISAL to grow a welcoming, innovative, and forward-looking society that supports both depth and diversity in ALife.
Lisa Soros
Background
I am currently an independent researcher transitioning out of academia, but have been working on open-ended evolution and open-endedness research generally since 2012. I was the Program Committee chair for the conference in 2020 and have generally helped with conference organization since then, in addition to serving on the ISAL Board for two full terms.
Statement of Goals
Academia (alongside society in general) is changing and being changed by technology such as generative AI. I would like to continue the work that I am currently doing, which includes documenting what things have been tried with respect to conference organization and understanding how best to preserve the unique culture of this community as our systems evolve.
Nathanael Aubert-Kato
Background
I am an associate professor at Ochanomizu University in Japan. My main research interests cover molecular robotics, evolutionary optimization, and swarming behaviors. I first joined the ALIFE community back in 2013 for the ALIFE conference and found a vibrant and diverse research community, which had a strong impact on my research, steering it towards the pursuit of emergent behaviors. Since then, I have stayed involved with the community. This year, my main contributions have been related to the ALIFE conference itself: (1) on a request from the ISAL board, I drafted a submission to ICORE to restore its ranking and (2) I helped with this year’s instance as part of the organization committee.
Statement of Goals
As part of the ISAL board, I would like to contribute to two related aspects: (1) keep aggregating statistics and insights on the ALIFE conference and related venues, which I started as part of the ICORE submission. That task has been challenging, as many researchers do ALIFE-like research without necessarily being part of the community or using that label (2) bridge the gap to other related communities. I have attended conferences on complex systems, active matter, and molecular robotics, among others, all with strong ALIFE-related aspects, yet few people in those fields knew about the ISAL community. I believe it would be possible to host joint workshops, both on the ALIFE side and at the main conferences of other communities, to enhance mutual knowledge and foster collaborations.
Federico Pigozzi
Background
I fell in love with ALife’s ability to explore unconventional minds in 2021. Since then, I have attended many GECCO and ALife events. I was elected conference chair of the Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life (ERA), the student chapter of ISAL, for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 terms. In 2023-24, I served as general chair of ERA. I am a team player and, thanks to the efforts of my colleagues, we witnessed an explosion of membership from two “dormant” Twitter and Slack accounts to a very active Discord server during my tenure as general chair.
I got my Ph.D. in 2024 with a thesis on voxel-based soft robots. I am now a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Michael Levin, where I work on developing complex systems tools for biology.
Statement of Goals
ISAL is a unique society that has shaped (and continues to shape) me as a researcher. I would love to help it grow. One issue I’m sympathetic to is championing ALife to the broader science world. In particular, I believe the “mainstream” AI community would benefit from more integration with ideas from self-organization and emergence. If elected, I’d thus be interested in brainstorming paths to increase the exposure of ALife, like workshops and tutorials at leading machine learning venues.
I thrive in planning and secretarial roles, rather than public-facing ones, but I’m open to different opportunities.
Dan Brickley
Background
I’m a British technologist who stumbled into developing web standards for structured data interoperability; work drawing on declarative logic-based AI. As a kid I was hooked by Dawkins’ Biomorphs, Steven Levy’s “Artificial Life”, and a documentary on neural networks. This led via a Philosophy degree to starting postgrad work on evolutionary methods for neural networks. Suddenly it’s 30 years later: I accidentally had a data standards career instead. My worldview centres interdisciplinary Connectionist ideas on mental representation and intelligent behaviour, although in my work (including at Google) I’ve found surprisingly practical uses for declarative KR (despite longstanding skepticism of it as Cognitive Science). Having dabbled in Applied ML, Deep Learning and LLMs, especially since the Newcastle Alife conference I feel an evolutionary perspective is sorely missing in modern AI. I’ve lately been reconnecting with earlier Alife investigations, e.g. around bringing simplified gene regulatory network ideas into agent simulations.
Statement of Goals
I’d like to help Alife collaboration span decades. Much inspiring software and data from 1990s Alife is rotting, lost or stuck in copyright limbo. People die, files are wiped. In any community this would be a pity. For Alife, a field which raises the prospect of simulations and artifacts with incrementally evolved complexity rivalling nature, it is a double tragedy. I’m wary of overpromising – much would depend upon collaboration. I hope for a role perhaps “Artifact Accessibility Chair”: looking both backwards (trying to ensure 30+ years of Alife software and data remains available) and forwards, e.g. suggesting licensing and shared technical approaches, such as formats, libraries. The simplest case for this is celebrating past efforts but there may also be a case in some Alife subfields for evolved lifelike-forms to develop over decades. After all, it took our ancestors long enough to reach multicellularity or the Cambrian explosion.
Richard Löffler
Background
I got my first introduction to the ALIFE community at ECAL in 2017 as a fresh PhD-student. I have been coming back ever since and have been involving myself by being part of two ALIFE-conference committees (2021 and 2022), co-organizing multiple workshops (CHEMALIFORMS I-V, Artlife2021 and GDB ALife), been part of the ERA board and most recently serving as the secretary on the ISAL board. My background is in nanobioscience, physical chemistry and complex chemical systems which is why I find myself in the wet ALIFE branch where I do laboratory experiments with non living chemical systems that have lifelike behavior such as self-propelled particles and droplets. I am fascinated by the concept of life and its origins. In ALIFE I found a community that offers unique and important approaches to unravel the mysteries of life that are often overlooked in other life-adjacent fields.
Statement of Goals
In my current appointed role as the secretary of ISAL I, with the help of others, have been making an effort to streamline some of the internal processes and the day to day activities of the board. Continuing that, I would like to be part of making the ISAL board as effective of an organ as possible such that we can bring all the fantastic ideas and initiatives we discuss at meetings to life in a proactive manner. This includes preparing an efficient pipeline for ideas from the wider community to reach the board. I would also consider involving myself in more public outreach to show to the scientific communities as well as the wider public how fascinating the work we do is and also how it could be a beneficial perspective to many different fields of science.