Complex Systems Summer School

Program Purpose and Value

Convening a global cohort of curious, driven, generous, and brilliant people from across a vast range of expertise and career stages sets the possibility space for SFI’s Complex Systems Summer School, a transformative learning experience in complexity science research. Invited speakers, SFI researchers, and participants engage in stimulating exchanges of methods, perspectives, and unanswered questions through conversations and projects that often continue beyond the three-week in-person program.

Even as complexity science is increasingly appreciated for its contributions of effective frameworks, perspectives, and methods to address frontier research questions, many who work in this domain often do so in relative isolation, from within a disciplinary home base. 

Supported by the intentional structure and design of the program, students at CSSS gain extensive experience as researchers, collaborators, learners, and communicators of complexity science while extending and cultivating their professional network. Students at CSSS are active participants, shaping their individual learning and research, and that of the group as a whole.

Photos Credit: Doug Merriam

Program Design and Structure

Participants spend three full weeks together in Santa Fe, arriving on a Tuesday, with full days of programming starting Wednesday morning. Programming runs each weekday — with some evenings and occasional weekend sessions — so that participants can maximize their learning and research while leaving space to reflect and recharge. The structure of CSSS emphasizes opportunities for getting to know fellow participants while also learning from a unique constellation of researchers from SFI’s wide-ranging network.

Week 1: Wednesday – Saturday
The program kicks off with sessions orienting participants to SFI and CSSS, opportunities for participants to share their expertise and interests, time dedicated to research project brainstorming and group formation, and a day at SFI.

Weeks 2 & 3: Monday – Friday
The middle weeks of the program have a steady schedule of dynamic lectures, interactive parallel sessions, and lunch with faculty speakers, as well as participant-led tutorials, group project work and check-ins with CSSS staff and SFI researchers, occasional evening keynote lectures and other special events, and a day at SFI.

Week 4: Sunday – Tuesday
The program concludes with time dedicated to working on group projects, presentations by each group, overall synthesis and program wrap-up, and a farewell dinner at IAIA.

After the program
Project groups, and the cohort as a whole, are encouraged to continue connecting virtually to work on projects and meet for journal clubs and participant-led tutorials. Final project abstracts and reports are due at the beginning of November. All participants who complete this final requirement will be issued a certificate of completion. Abstracts from group projects are made available on SFI’s website.

Note:

• A detailed schedule of speakers and sessions is provided to admitted students in April/May, following online registration.
• While most activity is based at IAIA, CSSS brings all students to the Santa Fe Institute once per week for an all-day visit — these are the only approved times to be on SFI campuses. 
• Many participants also enjoy self-organized excursions around Santa Fe during free time, and across the Southwest after the program concludes — rounding out an experience that balances focused work with chances to connect, explore, and think together.

Program Director

Photo Credit: Doug Merriam

Program Director Dave Feldman is a professor of physics and mathematics at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. He has been involved in CSSS since 2004. Feldman served as co-director of CSSS Beijing from 2006 to 2008 and has directed CSSS in Santa Fe since 2017. He has published two books, an introductory textbook on chaos and fractals and a book on dynamical systems that is part of the Primers in Complex Systems series. Feldman is a major contributor to Complexity Explorer, where you can take his courses on Dynamical Systems and Chaos and Fractals and Scaling.

SFI Faculty and Invited Experts

This section will continue to be updated as presenters are confirmed.

Liz Bradley • nonlinear dynamics | Erica Cartmill • language and thought | Simon DeDeo • cultural evolution | Jacob Foster • natural and artificial intelligences | Andrea Graham • immunological heterogeneity | Laurent Hébert-Dufresne • networks | Sonia Kéfi • ecological stability and resilience | Chris Kempes • major transitions of life from origins to societies | David Krakauer • complexity; intelligence and stupidity | Andrea Liu • physics of soft and living matter | Melanie Mitchell • abstraction and reasoning in AI systems | Holly Moeller • ecology and evolution of metabolism | Cristopher Moore • computation | Melanie Moses • collective behavior and resilience in biology and engineering | Mary O'Connor • community ecology; applied complex systems research | Brandon Ogbunu • complex biological and social systems | Orit Peleg • biological communication | Michael Ralph • slavery, insurance, and incarceration | Rajiv Sethi • markets and social information | Paul Smaldino • modeling social behavior | Fernanda Valdovinos • ecological networks | Andreas Wagner • evolution and fitness landscapes | Sara Walker • astrobiology | Thalia Wheatley • collective emotions

Outcomes