He has been a visiting research professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco; a postdoctoral fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UCB; a UCB physics department IBM postdoctoral fellow in condensed matter physics; a distinguished visiting research professor of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and a Bernard Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
Over the last three decades, Crutchfield has worked in the areas of nonlinear dynamics, solid-state physics, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, critical phenomena and phase transitions, chaos, and pattern formation.
His current research interests center on computational mechanics,[1] the physics of complexity, statistical inference for nonlinear processes, genetic algorithms, evolutionary theory, machine learning, quantum dynamics, and distributed intelligence.
[2] In 2022, Crutchfield and his graduate student Kyle Ray described a way to bring the heat production of conventional circuits below the theoretical limit of Landauer's principle by encoding information not as pulses of charge but in the momentum of moving particles.
However, because of technical limitation and the infamous gambler's ruin, the success was only partial and it was not feasible to use to make large profits.