SFI External Professor Steen Rasmussen (University of Southern Denmark) was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 ALIFE conference in Tokyo, Japan.

The award from the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) has been presented annually since 2014. Rasmussen is its fifth recipient, after Jordan Pollack (2017), Margaret Boden (2016), Inman Harvey (2015), and Christopher Langton (2014), who named the field.

Artificial life is a branch of complex systems wherein researchers seek to understand living systems "from the bottom-up," through computer modeling, robotics, chemistry, and other nonliving mediums.

Rasmussen was part of the core group of researchers who founded the field in the late 1980s. Since then, he says the main scientific driver for his work has been to understand the creative forces in nature and to use self-organization to engineer living processes. He is well-known for his pioneering research on protocells, which are cell-like entities created from nonliving materials. In recent years he has also investigted societal impacts of emerging intelligent and life-like technologies. 

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