Chris Kempes is a Professor at The Santa Fe Institute and an External Professor of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He obtained a PhD from MIT in Physical Biology before conducting postdoctoral research at NASA Ames Research Center and Caltech. His work focuses on the universal laws of life and spans the origins of life, the history of life, modern ecology, astrobiology, and the complexity of human organizations and cities. His work often uses fundamental constraints to determine universal laws of life and to predict the major transitions in life. His work has been applied to understanding climate change, inequality in cities, the growth of companies, human waste production, and possible biosignatures within our solar system. Professor Kempes’ work has been widely covered in a variety of media outlets ranging from the BBC to Wired magazine.