Undergraduate Complexity Research

Program Overview

Location: Santa Fe Institute (SFI) | Santa Fe, New Mexico, Southwest United States
Dates: June 6 to August 14, 2021

The SFI Undergraduate Complexity Research program (UCR) program provides a ten-week residential research experience during which students develop innovative research projects in collaboration with an SFI mentor. The program asks students to discard traditional disciplinary boundaries, and combine concepts and tools from the physical, natural, and social sciences. This allows students to ask big questions about real-world complex systems using the rigorous methods employed at the Santa Fe Institute. The program is designed to assist students in developing their own research questions and projects in close collaboration with the SFI faculty and postdoctoral fellows.

2020 SFI UCR Group who participated online

Online Possibility

This program was offered as an online research experience in 2020 due to the corona virus pandemic. We hope to host the program in-person in 2021, but if we are unabe to do so due to the pandemic, we will again offer it online.

We ask that students only apply if they are interested in participating in either format. Thanks.

The v-UCR program was an incredible learning experience that helped shape my research passions. The staff, my mentors, and my cohort peers provided so much support and inspiration! Throughout the summer, I was constantly reminded of how palpable the SFI spirit is, even through a computer screen.

— 2020 Participant

2019 SFI UCR Group at the Santa Fe Opera with UCR Mentor Vicky Yang

It has become increasingly vital for students across the sciences to gain computational and mathematical skills: the ability to translate real-world systems into quantitative models, carry out computational experiments, analyze these experiments using statistics, and compare results with real-world data. Students need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of multiple types of models — such as differential equations, discrete stochastic processes, and agent-based simulations — and judge which are useful for a given scientific question. At the same time, there is the need to combine these quantitative techniques with knowledge about specific systems in order to address the most important and frontier questions of the 21st century. The SFI UCR program is designed to meet these 21st-century needs through an exchange of quantitative techniques and specific knowledge.

The UCRs naturally form a tight-knit and supportive community, facilitated by living together in a campus setting and participating in a variety of social activities. Students are encouraged to, and in practice do, support each other socially and academically. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of the students and the program, students support each other using their respective strengths: a math major might help a biologist with a calculation; a computer science major might help coding and analyzing an algorithm; and a social or behavioral science major might help transform and analyze experimental data.

Video Interviews

Watch this video of interviews with our undergraduate alumni and hear about their experiences in the program at SFI. Note: the program’s name was changed from Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) to Undergraduate Complexity Research (UCR) in 2020.

More Program Information

The program recruits undergraduates from many different majors, ranging from computer science to physics, mathematics, biology, and the social sciences. We pair these students with mentors from many different scientific backgrounds, who guide the UCRs through projects that cross multiple fields. Recent project areas have included natural language processing, topic modeling, epidemiology, network theory, cell biology, and statistical physics. Projects have ranged from simulation to data analysis to proving theorems.

Students are in residence in Santa Fe for approximately 10 weeks, from June 6 to August 14, 2021. Prior to their SFI residency, students are encouraged to complete the online course “Introduction to Complexity” available on SFI’s Complexity Explorer (complexityexplorer.org). Throughout the summer, students are offered tutorials on the basics of data analysis, including concepts from computation, linear algebra, and statistics. Tutorials are also offered on science writing, presenting research, applying for jobs in science and how to pick a graduate school that is right for you.

UCR Final Presentations

Program Leaders

Mentors in this program include a range of specialists, including SFI resident and external faculty and post-doctoral fellows. The principal investigator of the UCR program, Christopher Kempes, is an SFI Professor. Chris generally focuses his work on biological architecture—which may include phenomena ranging from explicit biological morphology to metabolic and genetic network structure—as an intermediate between organism physiology and environmental conditions.

Please click here to apply.