For the first time, alumni of SFI’s postdoctoral programs, summer schools, and graduate and undergraduate programs have an online forum for connecting with fellow alumni and maintaining their involvement with the Institute's community.
SFI’s new Alumni Community forum allows users to find other alums and form complexity-focused collaborative research or social groups. It features an alumni map, notable alumni profiles, job opportunities in complex systems, alumni-relevant SFI news, and upcoming SFI events.
“Our former students and fellows are an enduring part of the Institute’s community,” says Ginger Richardson, SFI McKinnon Family Vice President for Education and Outreach. “They make continuing contributions to our research, serve as ambassadors for the Institute, and often help teach and lead future programs. Our new site enables alums to engage more deeply with SFI.”
The forum’s goal, says its coordinator Hilary Skolnik, is “to help our alumni stay involved with SFI, and give them a central place to connect and network with other researchers and students. We hope it will provide alumni with opportunities to continue some of the conversations they began at SFI.”
Richardson says she hopes the forum evolves wholly new kinds of interaction and collaboration. “Our alumni community is really the corpus for the larger complexity science community,” she says. “I can imagine alums organizing meetups in their communities, beginning online discussions relevant to complexity science, and forming collaborations around new complex systems questions. We’ve even discussed reunions and complexity festivals. This forum opens the door to interactions we haven’t dreamed of yet.”
Alumni who wish to sign up for the new community can find it at alumni.santafe.edu (profile setup takes less than 3 minutes).
Alumni are encouraged to enter the alumni T-shirt design competition; details can be found on the Alumni Community forum.