Applications are open for the 2026 cohort of SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellows, who hold the Omidyar Fellowship. This program supports recent Ph.D. recipients for up to three years while giving them broad freedom to explore their interests.
“It’s analogous to a junior faculty position without any teaching responsibilities, where you can pursue your own research agenda while getting mentorship from the entire SFI community,” says 2024 fellowship recipient Marina Dubova. The application window closes on October 1, 2025.
The Omidyar Fellowship was named in honor of Pam and Pierre Omidyar. Their initial donation, complemented by additional funding sources, continues to sustain the program. Each year since 2009, SFI has selected up to four new Fellows who primarily perform theoretical research. Alumni typically stay in academia and go on to become university professors, but some have taken positions as entrepreneurs, journalists, and data analysts in the tech industry.
Samuel Scarpino, for example, was a Complexity Fellow from 2013 through 2016 and is now the director of AI + life sciences at Northeastern University and an SFI External Professor. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, he’s been a go-to source for many journalists reporting on the virus. Meanwhile, one of the first Complexity Fellows, Nathan Eagle, went on to found a company called Jana that made the internet free for people in low-income countries.
Successful applicants tend to resonate with SFI’s focus on complex-systems science, says Postdoctoral Fellow Program Manager Hilary Skolnik, and are motivated to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds to answer questions that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Research projects might examine the emergent properties of systems that influence everything from human social networks to economies to ecosystems, for example.
Collaborations often begin formally during workshops, working groups, or the annual Postdocs in Complexity conference, or casually over daily lunch or 3 p.m. tea. Connections forged at these informal gatherings have been among the most valuable parts of the fellowship, says 2024 Complexity Fellow Kaleda Denton. “I approached Melanie Mitchell, who’s a world-renowned AI expert, and she was happy to start a collaboration with me, even though I come from a biology rather than computer-science background,” Denton says. Eventually, she plans to incorporate AI into her research on decision-making and bias.
The hundreds of scientists who visit SFI each year have made the Institute fertile ground for Dubova’s research on how scientists make discoveries. She conducts surveys and focus groups with visitors, and the results help her understand how scientists reason through their problems and how they understand the scientific process more generally.
For Pedro Márquez-Zacarías, who became a Complexity Fellow in 2022, abiding by disciplinary boundaries felt stifling during his Ph.D. in biology. SFI, on the other hand, feels like “a very natural place” for him to study how organisms maintain an organized state, rather than collapsing to thermodynamic equilibrium.
Beyond flexibility and escape from academic silos, Márquez-Zacarías also loves the natural beauty of the SFI campus, high on a mountain, above the heat of the desert. “It smells like pines and forests and freedom,” he says.
Read more and apply for SFI's 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship