October 13, 2025 | By Miselo Matipa (SF22) and Kirstin Fawcett (AGI27)

Aviral Chawla (SF22) is at the forefront of science exploration, pursuing a PhD in complexity science at the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Institute. Now entering his fourth year of research, he regularly draws parallels between his current work and the St. John’s Program. He also credits his undergraduate education for not only preparing him for his rigorous graduate work, but for helping him thrive in an interdisciplinary field.

For the uninitiated, complexity science is “the study of science with the perspective that IT is not super-deterministic, and the way things scale change the behavior of the way things are,” Chawla explains. “Most importantly, it is used on systems where there are a lot of moving parts. Epidemiology is one example of complexity science: how does human behavior change how viruses are spreading?” Chawla and his colleagues use computer modeling to not just predict but understand, analyze, and dissect various real-life outcomes arising from large data sets, mined from fields as disparate as public health, climate, economics, and ecology.

Chawla always enjoyed science and math, and at one point, he thought he would go on to study astrophysics. But while applying to college in India, he became disillusioned with the thought of being restricted to just one area of knowledge. Family encouraged Chawla to enter a technical school, but he had other ideas in mind, thanks in part to his mentor, a U.S. Department of Defense scientist-turned-educator who had returned home to India after working abroad.

Aware of not just Chawla’s interest in science but his nascent love of literature, philosophy, and music—topics the two had frequently discussed but were infrequently taught in most Indian schools—the mentor had discovered St. John’s College through the book Colleges That Change Lives, Loren Pope’s seminal guide to transformative liberal arts colleges in the U.S. He thought that Chawla might be a good fit for its famously expansive Program of Study. “I looked up the St. John’s website, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is it,’” Chawla says. “Suddenly, my life was not small anymore.”

St. John’s College was the only place to which Chawla applied, and he chose to matriculate in Santa Fe thanks to the region’s natural beauty. There he spent four years biking with friends, studying the Great Books, and gradually finding his way toward the field of complexity science while reading some of Western civilization’s greatest philosophers.

“What led me to complexity science,” Chawla explains, “was our junior year of seminar. We were going through Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hume. Science and the social sciences were bubbling together in ways that weren’t immediately obvious. The way Kant sort of took these ideas and was like, ‘OK, I'm going to take this soft science and try to ground it in something—I was like, ‘Wait, I wish people could do that more.’” From there, Chawla “got really into computational social sciences and epidemiology, modeling diseases while trying to understand them. I fell down the complex systems rabbit hole. It was so cool, all the things going on—and, most importantly, there were so many unanswered questions. The field was so ripe.”

COVID-19 loomed large behind these newly discovered interests, and Chawla opted to take a leave of absence during the pandemic, enrolling in data science training at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. Upon returning for his senior year in Santa Fe, he applied to study complex systems as a master’s candidate at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. Chawla was accepted to the program, as was William Thompson (SF21), a good friend and classmate. Chawla, initially wary of committing to a four-year PhD program, enjoyed his research and working alongside Thompson and University of Vermont assistant professor Juniper Lovato (SFGI13) so much that he decided to stay on and earn his doctorate.

In 2024, Chawla returned to his old stomping grounds in New Mexico for a month-long fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute, the leading theoretical research institute for complexity science. Revisiting old friends at his alma mater was exciting, as was the opportunity to befriend other scientists at the nonprofit while working together to connect ideas and patterns in biological, computational, physical, and social complex systems. As part of the 2024 cohort in the Complex Systems Summer School, Chawla conducted research with more than 40 researchers from around the world while housed at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Chawla found the experience inspiring, largely due to his fellow scientists and their wide-ranging curiosity. The Santa Fe Institute, he surmises, “is the closest that I have come to a St. John's-like experience.”

When it comes to said peers, it’s hard for Chawla not to occasionally compare himself with those in the field with extensive backgrounds in the hard sciences. However, he never feels at a disadvantage due to his liberal arts education: “It always feels like I could pick up anything I want to,” he says, by virtue of his having wrestled his way through thousands of years of Western thought while at St. John’s. “When I first came to the University of Vermont, there were so many things we didn't know, but it only took William [Thompson] and me maybe two to three months to catch up to where everybody else was with their computer science degrees. I feel like anything under the sun that can be learned can be learned by anyone.”

Right now, for example, Chawla is elbows-deep in several different research projects, including a philosophy-heavy thesis on how disparate worldviews influence large-language models and an ongoing analysis of more than 150 years of historical college course catalogs to better understand the evolution of American higher education. “You can really cut through a lot of noise and see patterns and see things that most people will not because they're not doing that close reading,” Chawla says. “And these days, AI is rich with philosophical connotations and consequences.”

Perhaps most importantly, he concludes, St. John’s instilled in him the ability to “fail gracefully” while stymied by stubborn problems—and the fortitude to try again. “I think what I’ve found in terms of succeeding in any technical space, including complex systems, is that what you really need is grit,” Chawla says. In his eyes, the Program, by virtue of its breadth and rigor, is certainly where he got his own.