Fifty-six participants from six continents met at SFI for the 2024 Postdocs in Complexity Global Summit on September 23–26. Participants shared knowledge and skills, discussed challenges, deepened existing research collaborations, and developed new project ideas.
Since 2017, SFI has partnered with the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) to host Postdocs in Complexity conferences, focusing on career development and networking. This year, SFI’s Emergent Political Economies (EPE) program also sponsored the meeting, opening registration to people who attended SFI’s first Complexity Global School. The goal was to build the scaffolding for more cross-continental collaboration and generate new, creative, and rigorous ideas relevant beyond academia.
“In the past, the conference has focused a lot on career conversations, and has highlighted North American and Western European perspectives,” says Mari Kawakatsu, a JSMF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who has attended two previous Postdocs in Complexity conferences. Those participants usually had a strong theoretical background and were working towards a research career. This year’s Global Summit participants came from a wider range of geographical perspectives, and many had a stronger background in application, rather than theory. “When the goals of the individuals are diverse, the conversations are more interesting — and more challenging,” says Kawakatsu.
The Summit focused on networking and skill-sharing. “Post-conference surveys indicated that the postdoc participants found that group activities and free time for interaction with one another to be the highlights of the conference,” says SFI Postdoctoral Fellows Program Manager Hilary Skolnik. “They value this opportunity to make new connections, and we tailored the agenda accordingly.” This year, the first day’s “speed dating” sessions helped the large group get to know one another quickly, while 3-minute talks allowed first-time attendees to present their research interests.
“Lots of effort went into getting us to know one another outside of our existing groups,” says SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Anna Guerrero, who has attended the past five Postdocs in Complexity conferences. “At first, I was skeptical — I really enjoyed the past conference structure — but it’s actually been great to bring in some new ideas and new energy.”
One of the new ideas was a session Guerrero proposed and facilitated. In past conferences, the professional development components didn’t always feel applicable to the participants’ individual situations, she says. “It could feel like they were talking to us, the peanut gallery.” And so this year, she led an informal peer-to-peer advice session. “I proposed it as ‘Ask the Peanut Gallery,’ where we became the experts for each other.”
Beyond creating space for networking and support, the Global Summit hosted participant-led tutorials. People with experience in theoretical tools and approaches like agent-based modeling and network science shared their skills with participants from applied backgrounds. And those working primarily in applied science shared examples of real-world impacts of complexity science.
Patience Akatuthwera, a Ugandan participant in last year’s Complexity Global School in South Africa, currently at Michigan State University, says that both CGS and the Global Summit have expanded her ideas about possible research directions. “I come from a background where complex systems isn’t well-known,” she says. “I realized I didn’t need to cage myself in mathematics. In a world that is so complex, you need to collaborate with people who have broad backgrounds to solve the problems facing our world today.”
This event was supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative - Special Initiative Award in Understanding Dynamic and Multi-scale Systems Awards (https://doi.org/10.37717/220020541 and https://doi.org/10.37717/2021-3655) and a grant from Omidyar Network.