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Interdisciplinary Fellowship in Sustainability, Technology, and Governance

About this position: The adoption of new technologies will a play crucial role in humanity’s ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The rules governing the advancement, selection, and adoption of these technologies are determined by a complex set of interconnected factors, including physical constraints, regulations, incentives, beliefs, and institutions. There is voluminous scholarly work exploring these factors in isolation. However, it is the interactions among these factors that ultimately arbitrate technology adoption.

The Santa Fe Institute is seeking applications for an Applied Complexity Fellow to pursue a two-year, post-doctoral level, independent research project aimed at better understanding the integrated systems governing the selection and adoption of technologies that help society mitigate and adapt to climate change. The ideal project would (i) be quantitively rigorous, (ii) be informed by continued engagement with relevant practitioners, and (iii) if successful, offer actionable insights for feasibly improving the ruling of the game.

We encourage applications from all applicants whose proposed research projects meets the three above criteria. However, we are particularly keen to hear from applications who:

  • Have some experience interacting with a national or international governance organization, or at an organization involved in the allocation of funding to new technologies. Ideally this work experience will inform the applicant’s proposed research project.
  • Hold a PhD or other advanced degree. The field in which the applicant’s terminal degree was awarded does not need to be related to their proposed research project, but the applicant should be able to demonstrate experience with scholarly publication and the peer-review process.
  • Have at least some exposure to the physical science or engineering.

This is a full-time, in-person position based in Santa Fe, but some travel is expected.

About SFI: Over the last 38 years, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) has developed a unique reputation within academia for our ability to blend unyielding intellectual rigor with a maverick disregard for disciplinary boundaries. Rolling Stone magazine has called us “[A] Justice League of renegade geeks, where teams of scientists from disparate fields study the Big Questions.” Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s comments on SFI can be found here. SFI is an independent non-profit (501.c.3) research institute. Our science is powered by 12 resident faculty, 4 fractal faculty, 18 resident fellows, and over 110 external faculty. Through our Miller Scholars Program we also engage with novelists, science fiction writers, and biographers. Working through the lens of complexity science, SFI has made major contributions to fields as varied as network science, economics, physics, computational modeling, scaling theory, collective intelligence, and many others.

To apply, please submit a cover letter, CV, names and contact information for three references, and a two-page (max) research project proposal. Apply here.

Review of applications will begin on March 15th. All applications received by March 31th will receive full consideration. 

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