SFI's Postdocs in Complexity Global Conference brings together interdisciplinary early-career researchers from around the world. This year’s conference, held September 15–18, drew 53 accomplished scholars for a four-day meeting focused on collaboration, networking, and idea-generation, and to deepen established research projects.
“Each year, we refine the agenda based on feedback from the previous conference,” says Hilary Skolnik, SFI Postdoc Program Manager. The meeting this year featured a few large changes — like spending a day at SFI’s Miller Campus in the new Gurley Forum — and some smaller tweaks.
One adjustment was to one of the best-loved features of the conference: Research Jams. In the past, conference participants signed up for these groups, which explore topics that might benefit from an interdisciplinary conversation, before the meeting began. This year, ideas for new Research Jams were presented on the first day of the meeting. “This gave the postdocs the chance to review the topics and ask more questions before diving in,” says Skolnik.
The 2025 Postdocs in Complexity Conference also leaned into conversations about public outreach and communication, navigating an academic job market in times of turmoil, and clarifying personal research focus and goals.
In one highly attended tutorial on “Setting the Stage for your Future Research Vision,” SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Katrin Schmelz encouraged attendees to think about what drives their personal research goals. It can be easy, especially for early-career researchers, to lose sight of your intrinsic motivations, she says, and write papers motivated by the prestige of either your collaborators or of a target journal. “As researchers, we sacrifice hours of sleep, family, and friends. You better care about how you spend your precious lifetime,” she says. “When you have your own vision, it’s easier to say ‘no’ to projects that aren’t on your track, and to pursue big questions that keep you and others excited.”
Karen Kelsky, who runs the academic advisory company The Professor is In, offered an insider’s perspective on career advice, writing cover letters, and acing an academic job interview, all with a realist’s perspective of the current uncertain environment.
“Academia is living through challenging times, and we need to start thinking outside the box,” says Travis Holmes, SFI’s Emergent Political Economies Program Manager, who led a discussion on the future of academic research. Building on two recent Undark op-eds by SFI Professor Brandon Ogbunu, Holmes invited the postdocs to consider how they might start asking big questions before pursuing tenure — not after, as is typical; ways they might bridge the gap between science and society; the importance of public outreach and communication; and what conversations they might begin having in their own hallways to begin changing some of the rigid structures of academia.
As with last year’s Postdocs Conference, this year’s meeting welcomed two research groups from the prior years’ Complexity Global School. Eight participants from the 2024 CGS, held in Bogotá, Colombia, gathered for the conference, followed by a week at SFI to continue their CGS research projects.
Even though this year’s conference dedicated more time to collaboration and tutorials, several new participants were invited to present three-minute “flash talks” to the whole group. For Maike Morrison, who joined SFI as a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow this fall, this aspect of the Postdocs Conference was part of what made it unlike any other meeting she had attended before. “It was really different from what I was expecting,” she says. “The joy of SFI is that you get to mix things up and see what happens — and this was refreshing and fun.”
The Postdocs in Complexity Conference is generously funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Emergent Political Economies program, and by gifts from The McKinnon Family Foundation and the Darla Moore Foundation.