Nathan Eagle, a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, has been named to the 2009 Technology Review Young Innovators Under 35 list. Eagle has pioneered the analysis of cell phone data to capture patterns on where and how people use their mobile phones.

“He is working with city planners in Kenya and Rwanda to understand how slums grow and change in response to events such as natural disasters and declines in crop prices. And earlier this year, Eagle began using phone-derived data to build a more accurate model of the spread of malaria in Africa. Previous models had relied on spotty information about people’s movements, collected in sporadic surveys. With a better picture of how the disease spreads, governments can improve the policies designed to fight it.”

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