Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez is a researcher on social complexity at the Applied Mathematics and Systems Research Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City. Holds a B.Sc. degree in basic biomedical research from UNAM and a PhD in biology from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. In the latter he worked under the supervision of Robert Seyfarth and the late Dorothy Cheney. His research interests include social behavior in primates, interactions and social structure in human communities, and social-ecological systems in biodiversity conservation projects. To explore these systems, he has established collaborations with researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral visitors from various disciplines, such as theoretical physics, economics and anthropology. He is an associate researcher at the Center for Complexity Sciences at UNAM and a member of the National Research System in Mexico. National Geographic Explorer since 2017 and fellow of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute since 2023. He teaches courses on social network analysis and is a thesis advisor at undergraduate and graduate level.

I am interested in understanding how complex structures emerge from relatively simple elements and interactions. I’ve used this approach to address questions about the emergence of complex patterns in non-human primate societies, particularly spider monkeys living in southeastern Mexico. In this talk I review a series of studies on how the behavior and decisions of the individuals that compose a society influence the generation of social structures, what interactions are established between social structures and the environment, what global properties these structures acquire and how these properties feedback  on individual decisions. In particular, I will present examples of how complex fission-fusion dynamics arise from the interplay between individual decisions and a variable foraging environment; how sharing information about this environment can lead to collectively intelligent foraging behavior; how social structure in fission-fusion dynamics is represented is a multiplex network and how to study global properties of these networks such as resilience and information processing.

Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez is a researcher based in Mexico, where he works at the National Autonomous University, the largest public university in the country. From 1997-2020 he coordinated, with Filippo Aureli and Colleen Schaffner, the longest running field study on spider monkey behavior in the world. Currently focused on analyzing large amounts of data from this field study in collaboration with physicists, sociologists and anthropologists.