Month: August 2024

Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships – Santa Fe Institute

We are accepting applications for the 2025 cohort until October 11, 2024.

The Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships, comprising the Omidyar Fellowships, are unique among postdoctoral appointments. The Fellowships offer early-career scholars the opportunity to undertake their own independent research within a collaborative research community that nurtures creative, transdisciplinary thought in pursuit of key insights about the complex systems that matter most for science and society. The Institute rejects compartmentalized thought common in academia. Instead, SFI scientists transcend boundaries between fields, freely synthesizing ideas spanning many disciplines – from math, physics, computer science and biology to the social sciences and the humanities – in pursuit of creative insights that advance our scientific frontiers.

Postdoctoral Fellows spend up to three years in residence at SFI, where they contribute to SFI’s research in the sciences of complexity and are trained to become leaders in interdisciplinary science. As thought leaders who shape the future of science, Postdoctoral Fellows also participate in a unique training program structured to develop leadership skills throughout their three-year residencies and beyond. The Institute provides an opportunity to collaborate with leading researchers worldwide, discretionary and collaborative funds, and a competitive salary with a generous benefit package including paid family leave.

The Institute has no formal programs or departments. Research is collaborative and spans the physical, natural, and social sciences. Most research is theoretical (SFI does not have lab facilities) and/or computational in nature, although it may include an empirical component. SFI has 21 postdoctoral researchers, 10 resident faculty, 100+ external faculty, and averages 1000 visitors per year. Descriptions of the research themes and interests of the faculty and current Fellows can be found at SFI Research.

More at: apply-sfi.smapply.org

School on Biological Physics across Scales: Pattern Formation. November 11 – 22, 2024,  São Paulo, Brazil

Systems as different as the cellular cytoskeleton, microbial communities in soil, and savanna landscapes have in common the emergence of patterns: random yet organized spatial structures that form in an otherwise translationally invariant space. These structures emerge due to the local, individual-level interactions of agents – proteins, cells, trees – that, on a larger scale, result in nonlinear dynamics for the density field. Crucial phenomena hinge on the formation of these patterns: mitosis, embryo development, bacterial population survival, ecosystem’s robustness to aridification.

While broadly different in scale, these systems can be theoretically described by similar statistical physics frameworks, an approach pioneered by Alan Turing in 1952 and still the focus of very active development. The goal of this school is to bring together experts on these different systems using mathematical modeling, experimental approaches and modern data-driven techniques to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue about pattern formation in living systems.

There is no registration fee and limited funds are available for travel and local expenses.

More at: www.ictp-saifr.org

See Also: 3rd ICTP-SAIFR Symposium on Current Topics in Molecular Biophysics (CTMB3): October 7 – 9, 2024