Hector Zenil

Hector Zenil was born in Mexico City and was given the French citizenship for academic merit after being awarded a double PhD from Lille and Paris (Sorbonne). Gregory Chaitin once described him as a "new kind of practical theoretician/experimentalist". He is also a British National.

He introduced the field of Algorithmic Information Dynamics and is currently a researcher at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge. He was appointed Senior researcher and policy advisor on AI for Scientific Discovery at the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, The Alan Turing Institute in London (British Library) in the UK.

After a BSc degree in mathematics (UNAM), a Masters in Logic (Paris/ENS), a PhD in Computer Science (Lille), and a PhD in Epistemology (Paris/CNRS), he was a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory Lab at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield in the UK before joining the structural biology group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford as a Senior Researcher (faculty member), and later as the Director of Oxford Immune Algorithmics, a biotech spinout devoted to transforming medicine from statistical symptom pattern-matching to causal diagnostics with operations in several countries.

He led the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden (the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology). He also leads the Algorithmic Nature Group, the lab that started the Online Algorithmic Complexity Calculator, and the Human Randomness Perception and Generation Project (prompting wide media coverage), a kind of inverse Turing test involving almost 3,400 humans.​ He is an elected member of the London Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a member of the Canadian Collegue of Health Leaders.

He is the Managing Editor of Complex Systems, the first journal in the field of complexity science founded by Stephen Wolfram in 1987. Editor for several journals including Entropy, Information, Frontiers in AI, and Complexity; and for academic book series such as Springer on Complexity.

He is the author and editor of several books for Springer, World Scientific Publishing Company, and the Imperial College Press two of which were bestsellers (Randomness Through Computation and A Computable Universe--with a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose). He has written more than 100 papers in indexed and peer-reviewed top journals and scholar volumes including Nature, The Royal Society, Nucleic Acids Research, Behavior Research Methods, Physica A, and Visual Cognition, among others.