Corina Tarnita
Senior Fellow 2024–2025

Corina Tarnita joined the Princeton faculty in February 2013 after completing her term as a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows (2010–2012). She earned her PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University and has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences.

Corina’s research focuses on understanding complex adaptive systems, which range from single cells to entire ecosystems and from human social behavior to cultural evolution. She explores how these systems originate, assemble, interact with their environment, and evolve over time. Her work addresses one of today’s most critical challenges: understanding and managing systems that display emergent patterns—behaviors or structures that arise at scales larger than their individual components—across diverse fields like biology, conservation, medicine, sociology, and politics.

Central to her research is the development of general theoretical frameworks. She combines these frameworks with empirical data to identify and catalog natural patterns. By embedding these patterns within her models, she generates predictions that are rigorously tested, often through collaborations with experimental and field-based researchers.