Complexity-GAINs grant concludes with school on ecological resilience

Over the past three years, SFI has hosted an annual Complexity-GAINs school in different locations in Europe. The two-week-long programs, each focused on a unique theme, introduced Ph.D. students to the theory and practice of complex systems through lectures and group projects. In 2022, students gathered in Vienna, Austria, to explore the topic of social-behavioral systems. The following year’s school in Cambridge, England, focused on intelligent systems. The third and final school, focused on ecological resilience and persistence, was held last October in Sète, France.

The biggest challenges we face today, from the rise of artificial intelligence to belief dynamics to ecological sustainability, need answers that are difficult to find through traditional academic disciplines. “These challenges require a robust understanding of complex systems — but there aren’t many opportunities for Ph.D. students to engage deeply with complexity training,” says SFI Education Director Suzanne Kern. Co-funded by SFI and a grant from the National Science Foundation, Complexity-GAINs has worked to fill that gap. 

Across the sciences and throughout the world, researchers are encouraged to specialize. That’s because the pace of research keeps speeding up with more to know and more papers to read every day, says SFI Professor Chris Kempes, a co-director of the most recent Complexity-GAINs school. “But there are ideas that need cross-cutting approaches. That’s the pole and the role of SFI: to support big-theory integration. And that’s what we’ve offered through these schools.”

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Andrew Stier, who attended the first school in Vienna, returned to the program as a teaching fellow this fall. “Most grad students who have participated in an SFI program share a common experience: They first realize that everyone there feels similarly isolated in their departments, but leave with a broader sense that there are a lot of people at different career stages all being successful doing weird, non-siloed work,” he says.

This final Complexity-GAINs school drew 28 Ph.D. students from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and across Europe, and defined “ecology” broadly, focusing on topics from the origins of life to field ecology to human ecology and the impacts of the Anthropocene. Like other SFI schools, Complexity-GAINs featured group projects as a key component. Students worked in small groups to tackle big questions based on their own interests, integrating the tools and methods they learned in the course.

Two weeks is a very short time to get to know one another, build rapport, learn new research methods, and develop a robust project. The organizers found creative ways to speed up these processes. They asked the students first to introduce themselves through three-minute flash presentations and, later, “speed scientific interactions” — short, highly focused, one-on-one conversations. After the students identified their research questions, formed small groups to work on them, and wrote up page-long synopses, the instructors surprised the groups with late-night advice.

“We played scientific fairy godmothers,” says Kempes. “We came after class and left post-it notes on each proposal saying things like ‘look at this paper from the ‘80s’ or ‘how are you going to deal with this particular task?’ We wanted to support them, but also to situate things in the literature and to do so as efficiently as possible.” And the projects, says Kempes, were all really good. “Students took the new techniques they had learned and applied them to new and interesting questions. They built on ideas like tipping points and networks and scaling, and deployed them with creativity and in highly diverse teams. That’s exactly what we wanted.”

Themed schools like the three Complexity-GAINs programs and the annual summer Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science are important components of SFI’s educational programming, says Kern. “Because these schools are built around common interests, these students are likely to be in one another's close orbits moving forward. They are likely to re-encounter each other in the normal disciplinary settings, but now they have these shared tools and perspectives — common language and case studies — and the experience of expanding their minds together.”

This program was made possible through the support of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2106013 (PI Krakauer), IRES Track II: Complexity advanced studies institute - Germany, Austria, Italy, Netherlands (Complexity-GAINs). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the investigator(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.