About

Simon A. Levin is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and the Director of the Center for BioComplexity in the High Meadows Environmental Institute. His research examines the structure and functioning of ecosystems, the dynamics of disease, and the coupling of ecological and socioeconomic systems. Levin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, and the Istituto Lombardo (Milan). He has over 500 publications and is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity and the Princeton Guide to Ecology.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Response diversity as a sustainability strategy

  Nature Sustainability · 2023 · 69 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fundamental limitations on efficiently forecasting certain epidemic measures in network models

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 20 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematical optimization

  The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of developing reliable forecasts that would allow decision makers to devise appropriate response strategies. Despite much recent research on the topic, epidemic forecasting remains poorly understood. Researchers have attributed the difficulty of forecasting contagion dynamics to a multitude of factors, including complex behavioral responses, uncertainty in data, the stochastic nature of the underlying process, and the high sensitivity of the disease parameters to changes in the environment. We offer a rigorous explanation of the difficulty of short-term forecasting on networked populations using ideas from computational complexity. Specifically, we show that several forecasting problems (e.g., the probability that at least a given number of people will get infected at a given time and the probability that the number of infections will reach a peak at a given time) are computationally intractable. For instance, efficient solvability of such problems would imply that the number of satisfying assignments of an arbitrary Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form can be computed efficiently, violating a widely believed hypothesis in computational complexity. This intractability result holds even under the ideal situation, where all the disease parameters are known and are assumed to be insensitive to changes in the environment. From a computational complexity viewpoint, our results, which show that contagion dynamics become unpredictable for both macroscopic and individual properties, bring out some fundamental difficulties of predicting disease parameters. On the positive side, we develop efficient algorithms or approximation algorithms for restricted versions of forecasting problems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts

  AMBIO · 2022 · 73 citations

  • Political Science
  • Economic system
  • Business

  Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction to PNAS special issue on evolutionary models of financial markets

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 41 citations

  • Finance
  • Business
  • Economics

  At present, there are no criteria to evaluate whether a coronavirus can cause pandemics with severe inflammation or just common colds. We provide a possible answer by considering the virus not only as an infectious agent but as a reservoir of ...It is unclear how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection leads to the strong but ineffective inflammatory response that characterizes severe Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), with amplified immune activation in diverse ...

  DOI

• Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere

  AMBIO · 2021 · 660 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Environmental ethics

  The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and the scale and pace of the human dimension have caused climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilizations. The Anthropocene reality-of rising system-wide turbulence-calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emergent Field-Driven Robot Swarm States

  Physical Review Letters · 2021 · 86 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  We present an ecology-inspired form of active matter consisting of a robot swarm. Each robot moves over a planar dynamic resource environment represented by a large light-emitting diode array in search of maximum light intensity; the robots deplete (dim) locally by their presence the local light intensity and seek maximum light intensity. Their movement is directed along the steepest local light intensity gradient; we call this emergent symmetry breaking motion "field drive." We show there emerge dynamic and spatial transitions similar to gas, crystalline, liquid, glass, and jammed states as a function of robot density, resource consumption rates, and resource recovery rates. Paradoxically the nongas states emerge from smooth, flat resource landscapes, not rough ones, and each state can directly move to a glassy state if the resource recovery rate is slow enough, at any robot density.

  DOI

• Stepping Up: A U.S. Perspective on the Ten Steps to Responsible Inland Fisheries

  Fisheries · 2021 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Business

  Abstract The Ten Steps to Responsible Inland Fisheries are global recommendations to address the subordinate position of inland fisheries in sustainability dialogues. Regional and local perspectives are essential for implementing global initiatives. Hence, we surveyed state fisheries agency administrators and American Fisheries Society Governing Board members about the importance, funding, and achievability of the Steps. Respondents rated Science, Communication, and Assessment as highly important, well funded, and achievable steps, unlike Aquaculture and a global Action Plan. Nutrition was rated the most inadequately supported yet achievable step, highlighting an opportunity to promote nutritional contributions of inland fisheries. Opinions were similar between administrators and Governing Board members across U.S. regions, suggesting a foundation for incorporating underemphasized steps into management programs by building multi-organizational partnerships and applying lessons from better integrated steps (e.g., Science, Assessment). Overall, the Steps can advance freshwater science and management in the United States while increasing the visibility of inland fisheries that are rarely prioritized globally.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Epidemiological and evolutionary considerations of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dosing regimes

  Science · 2021 · 254 citations

  • Immunology
  • Biology
  • Virology

  Given vaccine dose shortages and logistical challenges, various deployment strategies are being proposed to increase population immunity levels to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Two critical issues arise: How timing of delivery of the second dose will affect infection dynamics and how it will affect prospects for the evolution of viral immune escape via a buildup of partially immune individuals. Both hinge on the robustness of the immune response elicited by a single dose as compared with natural and two-dose immunity. Building on an existing immuno-epidemiological model, we find that in the short term, focusing on one dose generally decreases infections, but that longer-term outcomes depend on this relative immune robustness. We then explore three scenarios of selection and find that a one-dose policy may increase the potential for antigenic evolution under certain conditions of partial population immunity. We highlight the critical need to test viral loads and quantify immune responses after one vaccine dose and to ramp up vaccination efforts globally.

  DOI

• Immune life history, vaccination, and the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 over the next 5 years

  Science · 2020 · 328 citations

  • Immunology
  • Medicine
  • Biology

  The future trajectory of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic hinges on the dynamics of adaptive immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); however, salient features of the immune response elicited by natural infection or vaccination are still uncertain. We use simple epidemiological models to explore estimates for the magnitude and timing of future COVID-19 cases, given different assumptions regarding the protective efficacy and duration of the adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2, as well as its interaction with vaccines and nonpharmaceutical interventions. We find that variations in the immune response to primary SARS-CoV-2 infections and a potential vaccine can lead to markedly different immune landscapes and burdens of critically severe cases, ranging from sustained epidemics to near elimination. Our findings illustrate likely complexities in future COVID-19 dynamics and highlight the importance of immunological characterization beyond the measurement of active infections for adequately projecting the immune landscape generated by SARS-CoV-2 infections.

  DOI

• Targeted rapid testing for SARS-CoV-2 in the emergency department is associated with large reductions in uninfected patient exposure time

  Journal of Hospital Infection · 2020 · 22 citations

  • Medicine
  • Emergency medicine
  • Intensive care medicine
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• 絵 西村

  1 shared

Labs

• Levin LabPI

Awards & honors

• Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences
• Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences
• Margalef Prize for Ecology
• Ecological Society of America’s MacArthur Award
• Ecological Society of America’s Eminent Ecologist Award

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