University philosopher and biographer Professor Ray Monk has received the Miller Distinguished Scholarship from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI).

As the Miller Scholar for 2017, Professor Monk will be in residence at the Institute in New Mexico, USA, from February to May 2017.

Professor Monk is the eighth Miller Scholar since SFI Chair Emeritus Bill Miller conceived and underwrote the scholarship in 2010. The Scholarship is the most prestigious visiting position at the SFI, awarded to highly accomplished, creative thinkers who make profound contributions to science, society, and culture.

Scholars are internally nominated, and may have backgrounds in the physical sciences, social sciences, or the humanities. Previous recipients include actor-author-playwright Sam Shepard, authors Hampton Sides, Laurence Gonzales and Neal Stephenson, philosophers Rebecca Goldstein and Daniel Dennett and quantum mechanic Seth Lloyd.

During their stays at the SFI, Miller Scholars are encouraged to collaborate with researchers, with the goal of catalysing scientific interactions and crystallising ongoing research at the Institute, devoting their time to scholarship on any topic.

Professor Monk’s work includes award-winning biographies of the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Both works focus on the American theoretical physicist and wartime head of America’s Los Alamos Laboratory, often described as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’.