Emma Zajdela, an Intelligence Community postdoctoral research fellow in the Levin and Oppenheimer Labs, HMEI, and C-PREE at Princeton University, served as a faculty for the first Complexity Global School (CGS) organized by the Santa Fe Institute in December 2023.  The 2024 Complexity Global School brought together 60 students from 17 countries to explore ideas at the intersection of complexity science and political economy.  The School, which is part of SFI’s Emerging Political Economies program, was hosted by partnering institutions Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.  Founded in 1984, the Santa Fe Institute is the first research institute dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems.  

Following the school, Emma was a mentor for a research project conducted by three students Sodiq Mojeed (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ghana), Phanie Negho (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Senegal), and Patience Akatuhwera (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Ghana). Their project titled, “Scialog: An Antidote to  Homophily Effects in Scientific Collaboration” used data provided by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the oldest science philanthropy in the US, to investigate the role scientific conferences can play in generating diverse, interdisciplinary teams. Their project was selected as one of two winning projects among 18 submissions. As a prize, the group was invited to visit the Santa Fe Institute in September 2024 to continue their research.  The first author of the paper, Sodiq Mojeed, will be presenting the research as a featured poster with a live Q&A discussion in an National Institutes of Health (NIH) Future of Scientific Conferences workshop on June 7: https://www.labroots.com/ms/virtual-event/future-scientific-conferencing.