14 September 2015 - 15 September 2015
Laxenburg, Austria

International School of Excellence for Systems Analysis and Systems Science Scoping Workshop

A scoping workshop for the establishment of an International School of Excellence for Systems Analysis and Systems Science (ISE), will be held on 14-15 September 2015 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg Austria.

The impetus for this major initiative stems from the fact that the major global challenges of the 21st century will require international and interdisciplinary teams of researchers with stakeholder engagement to help governments and societies understand the complexities and interconnections of global change, and assist in developing integrated solutions to address these challenges both globally and locally.

However, just when the need is greatest, the number and quality of scientists working in integrative systems science is still limited. Unfortunately the nature of tenure track or equivalent career development pathways means that early to mid-career researchers are constrained and encouraged and rewarded to develop and maintain a strong single discipline focus. Opportunities for long-term cooperative, integrated, interdisciplinary research are very limited. Clearly there is a need to develop and support a strong international cohort of high quality integrative thinkers and researchers capable of developing integrated interdisciplinary solutions to global challenges.

The primary focus of the ISE is therefore to build and develop a global network of next generation systems scientists and thinkers. The program will thus assemble an international cohort of top-class, early to mid-career scientists, each supported by both postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to work collaboratively on a transdisciplinary research program of global significance. Scholars will be selected to cover a broad variety of system analytical disciplines across the physical, natural, and social sciences. These scholars will contribute their individual disciplinary skills to build international multidisciplinary teams. In addition, the scholar will establish active collaborations with other scholars domestically, internationally and within IIASA.

The ISE is not designed to be a ‘single campus school’ – rather each participating scholar will be based, and spend most of the working year, in-country at his or her home institution, and annually brought together as a cohort at IIASA to promote integration and collaboration.

This scoping workshop will bring together representatives of relevant funding agencies across IIASA’s National Member Countries, key members of the Belmont Forum, and beyond. The goal of the workshop is to explore and begin to co-develop a framework and funding mechanism(s), based on other international cooperative mechanisms such as the Belmont Forum, that will allow for maximum inclusion of participating countries and expand the current, highly successful, nationally based research funding approaches into a collaborative global network of agencies and institutions addressing the challenges of global research and capacity building.


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Last edited: 10 February 2016

RESEARCH PARTNERS

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313