Update April 4: The CGS selection committee will begin reviewing applications on April 8, 2024. Priority will be given to submissions completed by April 8; later submissions will be considered on a rolling basis until April 22.
Applications for the second Complexity Global School — to be hosted at Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes), in Bogotá, Colombia, from July 21 to August 3 — are now open. Candidates based in Latin America, Western Europe, the Caribbean, U.S., and Canada are eligible to apply*. A total of 60 students will be selected. Supported by the Omidyar Network, the school is free for all admitted students, inclusive of tuition, room, board, and travel stipend.
“We are looking for courageous thinkers who want to learn new methods, while simultaneously helping in our search for new paradigms to understand political, economic, and social life,” says Will Tracy, organizer of the event and Vice President at the Santa Fe Institute. “Our search for new paradigms is fiercely interdisciplinary. We are interested in early-career academics from across the social and natural sciences, as well as intellectually driven practitioners from government, civil society, and industry.”
The school will feature a series of lectures introducing fundamental mechanisms and models of complex systems and how they relate to political economies. Core topics will include network analysis, computational social science, applied scaling theory, emergent engineering, and digital humanities. Students will learn how to apply those topics, methods, and models to diverse phenomena such as inequality, climate change, belief dynamics, technological disruption in social systems, federalism, and belief dynamics, and the future of work.
“Uniandes is very excited to participate in this Complexity Global School and, as part of our TREES (Teaching and Researching Equitable Economics from the South) Initiative, we want to encourage applicants from the Latin American region coming from different disciplines with keen interest in building transdisciplinary approaches to pressing issues in society, and our region in particular, through the complexity lens,” says Juan Camilo Cárdenas, economics professor at Uniandes and co-leader of the TREES initiative.
The school has onsite and remote components. The onsite component includes an intensive 12-day program focusing on interactions between faculty and students, and the formation of project groups. During the remote component — August 4 to November 5 — students will collaborate virtually with their groups to finish their projects.
The Complexity Global School is based on the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School, which has been running for over 30 years and whose alumni have gone on to hold top positions in academia, government, and industry.
*Applicants based in the following regions are eligible to apply:
- Caribbean (Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago)
- Central America (Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Belize)
- Europe (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.)
- North America (Canada, the United States, Greenland, and Mexico)
- South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, the Falkland Islands, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay)