Queen’s University Belfast is delighted to launch the recruitment process for 20 Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs) as part of its Foresighters Doctoral Training Programme. This offers an exceptional opportunity for future research leaders to access an innovative programme of doctoral training at one of the UK’s leading universities and engage in high impact, inter-disciplinary research with a wide range of non-academic partners.

FORESIGHTERS (Future ORiEnted Skills, Innovation for Governance for Health, Technology, EneRgy, citieS and creativity) offers unique opportunities to build a future research career that tackles complex societal problems. While researchers will be based in academic units across the university, from engineering, humanities, social science and the arts, they will be working within one of 5 interdisciplinary research themes (Health, Technology, Energy, Future Cities, and Creativity). The cohort of researchers will be bound by a common perspective and training in Futures Thinking and Futures Literacy and will develop the skills and capabilities to understand, imagine, and critically use different ideas about the future to better understand key challenges. In addition to advanced training offered by the Thomas Moran Graduate School, FORESIGHTERS ESRs will be trained in skills for anticipating change and using multiple possible futures to stimulate reflection, creativity, resilience and focus for contemporary action. The training programme also has a strong emphasis on the development of sustainable, diverse, and equitable research environments.

More at: www.qub.ac.uk

This initiative aims to identify and structure the foundational contributions that define complex systems, network science, and related domains, across theory, methods, and applications. The goal is to build a coherent, field-wide reference that reflects how the discipline is actually used and understood across different subdomains.

In recent years, large-scale models and automated systems have made it possible to synthesize vast amounts of scientific information. However, identifying what is foundational — what truly shapes the conceptual and methodological backbone of a field — still requires distributed expert judgment. This effort is designed to complement algorithmic approaches by leveraging collective intelligence: many independent perspectives, aggregated into a structured view.

The objective is not to produce a simple ranking of famous papers, but to build a structured map of the field’s foundations, including works that may be missing from keyword-based or citation-based approaches.

Read the full article at: manliodedomenico.com

The Complex Systems Society announces the 2026 edition of the CSS Scientific Awards. 

The Emerging Researcher Award recognizes promising researchers in Complex Systems within 3 years of their PhD defense.

The Junior Scientific Award is aimed at recognizing excellent scientific record of young researchers within 10 years of their PhD defense.

The Senior Scientific Award will recognize outstanding contributions of Complex Systems scholars at any stage of their careers.

Deadline: April 30th, 2026.

See https://cssociety.org/community/awards for the list of previous awardees.

More at: cssociety.org

The yrCSS Advisory Board is composed of six members and is partially renewed every year. This year, there are three vacant places with a mandate of two years. We are therefore looking for motivated early-career researchers who wish to be a part of the Advisory Board. Please, consider applying and/or spreading this call.

Application deadline: February 28th

Voting: March 1-15th

More at: yrcss.cssociety.org