Santa Fe Global Sustainability Summer School

From the 25th of July to the 5th of August 2016 I participated in a two week long summer school hosted at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), the premier Centre for complex systems research. This year the theme was Urban Sustainability and it provided huge insights into how to better manage the transition towards more sustainable cities, a major theme of my research.

What immediately struck when I arrived at SFI was the extremely diverse group of individuals that was brought together, both amongst the students and the teaching staff. Participants came from diverse fields such as epidemiology, economics, the arts, law and the humanitarian sector. My research is considered to be interdisciplinary but the breadth of fields represented by the participants far exceeded anything I had ever experienced previously. This made for extremely enlightening debate and discussion about the problems cities are facing while drawing from a huge pool of extremely varied experiences.

The bulk of the summer school consisted of lectures delivered by experts from around the world. These touched upon diverse issues such as urban sociology, urban ecology, big data, complexity science, and how the evolution of technologies occurs. Despite working in urban sustainability my eyes were opened to entire new fields and potential areas for future research.

Outside of the lectures, we formed small groups to undertake short research projects. My group worked on a project that performed some big data analysis on non-emergency phone calls made to the city of Boston. By correlating these calls with weather data we investigated the robustness and resilience of Boston to different weather events. This project evolved into a broader project where we will investigate national scale infrastructure resilience and we hope to take this work towards publication.

Overall my time at SFI was a great experience that has significantly shaped how I think about my research and the future direction of my work.