Nuno Bento: What can be more rewarding than working on some of the most pressing issues of our time, using your skills to produce solutions that can have real impacts on the future of mankind? IIASA provides outstanding conditions for analyzing these global problems, in terms of the knowledge capacity of its research staff and the supporting infrastructure, both of which improve the likelihood of a successful research experience. While many researchers across the world are constantly trying to find a needle in a haystack; IIASA can provide you with a metal detector!
Jose Siri: The unique opportunities available to post-doctoral fellows at IIASA mirror the exceptionality of the Institute itself. In few places is such a breadth of scientific interests backed by such a history of distinguished research, or paired with the imperative for global policy relevance that is one of IIASA’s enduring trademarks. As a postdoc, I have been deeply influenced—to my great advantage—by IIASA’s interdisciplinarity, internationality, collegiality, and participation at a high level in addressing the grand challenges of our times. Internalizing the Institute’s nuanced way of examining and addressing complex problems has expanded and enhanced my own scientific capabilities, and working in its really unparalleled ambience has been a highlight of my career so far.
Xiaojie Chen: I think IIASA is a place of international culture and interdisciplinary research. At IIASA, I can discuss and collaborate with colleagues from my own discipline and also have the chance to communicate with colleagues of completely different backgrounds. The postdoc opportunity at IIASA can help me further study my research projects and broaden my research topics. Moreover, it is very exciting that I have the opportunity to conduct my research work into some realistic applied systems, and hence to solve real-world problems facing the needy in people’s work and daily life.
Katsumasa Tanaka: I first came to IIASA as a participant of the 2005 Young Scientists Summer Program and later returned as a IIASA postdoc in April 2007. I like the international/interdisciplinary culture here. It is certainly an exciting but challenging task to build up interdisciplinary collaborations as a postdoc. But in my view this interdisciplinary nature of the institute attracts people and provides a distinct value to the IIASA Postdoc Program.
Edmar Teixeira: The postdoctoral opportunity at IIASA is a unique experience to work with multi-disciplinary teams. Different from an academic environment, programs are organized to tackle common challenges that society is facing, such as climate change, population growth, air pollution and land use changes. Researchers have to apply their expertise on a broader context to analyze complex systems and produce applied scientific output relevant for policy making needs. One of the advantages of being at IIASA is to learn to communicate with colleagues of completely different backgrounds and discover new angles to work on common problems.
Tapas Mishra: When I joined IIASA's post doctoral program I soon realized that not all academic theories, however rigorously thought out, can interpret the integrated dynamics of the real world. At IIASA I learnt the efficacy of applying theory to practice and deriving policies which are integrated in nature. The multidimensional approach to viewing a problem often encourages integrated solutions to a very complex system. If you wish to test a theory and enlarge its core, IIASA is one of the best places to do it. IIASA's postdoctoral program is a learning experience in itself as researchers, while continuing with their own research, can easily become involved in themes running in different programs. A two-year postdoctoral research position at IIASA, opens up a world of career opportunities, that are not confined to the academic sphere.
