Sociologist Dalton Conley Joins the Dent 2025 Speaker Lineup
Dalton Conley—renowned sociologist, pioneering thinker, and one of the most decorated interdisciplinary scholars in the country—will take the stage at Dent: Santa Fe 2025.
Conley holds the prestigious title of Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton, is a faculty affiliate at the New York Genome Center, and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the only sociologist ever to receive the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His academic credentials include not one, but two PhDs—one in sociology and one in biology—underscoring his ability to bridge domains of human and scientific understanding that are too often siloed.
At Dent Santa Fe 2025, Conley will delve into themes from his latest book, The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture—a work that reimagines how attributes, decisions, and behaviors travel through systems, shaping outcomes over time. In a recent New York Times guest essay titled “A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way,” Conley articulates the core of this emerging field—sociogenomics—and makes a compelling case that nature and nurture are not separate forces, but rather part of a single, self-influencing feedback loop: a Möbius strip of human development.
From polygenic indexes to environmental influence, his work explores how traits like educational attainment or health predispositions don’t simply “exist” in individuals—they co-evolve with their contexts. For leaders, designers, and founders, this perspective offers a sharper model for how systems behave, how behaviors are reinforced, and where meaningful leverage resides.
Conley’s addition to the Dent 2025 lineup sits comfortably alongside the tradition of Dent speakers who reveal the mechanics beneath the surface: Adam Gopnik’s exploration of mastery, Heather Berlin’s insights into the neuroscience of creativity, and Greg Lukianoff’s mapping of institutional resilience. Conley adds to this pantheon with a framework for understanding how influence flows—not in theory, but in the real environments where people grow, build, and lead.
To be part of this year’s Dent experience in Santa Fe, you can apply to attend here and join a curated community of entrepreneurs, creatives, and changemakers committed to making a lasting impact.