After getting his B.A. from Dartmouth College, Stuart attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, then earned his M.D. at the University of California, San Francisco.   He taught biophysics, biochemistry and theoretical biology at the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, before consulting to Los Alamos National Laboratory, and joining the Santa Fe Institute in 1986 as a professor and Science Advisory Board member. Stuart received a  MacArthur fellowship and spent a decade pioneering visionary work in the new science of complexity.

In 2003, he became a research professor in cell biology and physiology at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine,  and an adjunct professor in the pathology department at the Anderson Cancer Center.  In 1990, Stuart founded Genesys Molecular Inc., and six years later, became the founding general partner of the Bios Group LP, in Santa Fe, NM.  

Stuart holds 12 patents in biotechnology and economics, and is the author of four books on molecular evolution, including the critically-acclaimed At Home in the Universe, in which Kauffman theorizes about the forces for order that lie deep within the most complex of systems from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, and the rise and fall of great civilizations.  Stuart is currently living in Calgary, Alberta, where he is director of the Biology and Physics Departments at the University of Calgary’s Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics.