tl;dr: We are starting an invite-only interdisciplinary research Seminar on Planetary Management. You and your students/research team are invited. Schedule and rules are here. To accept this invitation, register here.

Hi SDevers,

We hope everyone is weathering this crazy year safely.

As you all know, we face unique challenges as an intellectual research community.

In particular, we are goal-oriented, aiming to maximize global well-being while ensuring its sustainability. In order to achieve this goal, we use whatever disciplinary tools are needed—similar to how engineers use whatever tools they need to make a plane fly safely. This disciplinary fluidity sometimes makes it difficult for us each to find support from colleagues with similar training or objectives.

In addition, because many of us participate in multiple fields and engage with practitioners and/or the private sector, we are exposed to a diverse set of cultures, norms, and intellectual identities. This can be rewarding because it allows us to glean benefits from each group. But it is also challenging, since the objectives of individual fields do not necessarily align with ours, and it can be difficult to resist the pull of culturally-strong and well-organized disciplines.

The “SDev diaspora” has been effective at showing the world what we are capable of providing, and injecting new thinking into various communities. Yet it has left many of us feeling isolated, undersupported, under pressure to conform, or—frankly—lost.

We can fix this. Communities form when people decide to pursue a common goal; new fields coalesce when researchers are able to demonstrate their value and articulate what it is that members of their field do. We can and should build a stronger intellectual community that is more interconnected and better organized.

In “Stage 0” of the SDev story, many people (e.g., Jeff, Joe, Lisa, John, Doug, Wolfram, Josh, Geoff, and others...) realized that existing disciplines were not fully addressing many of the world’s problems, and they worked to create institutional breathing room for some of us to give it a shot. In Stage 1, the first several cohorts tried to piece together an education and produce research that would demonstrate to the world that a new, useful path exists. We are now in Stage 2: demonstrating that the education and research procedures can be replicated on new cohorts, that graduates can obtain jobs, survive in the wild, and train their own successful students. With the SDev program now viewed as a leading interdisciplinary program and a growing number of graduates tenured at universities around the world, we think this community is ready for the next stage.

Stage 3 is demonstrating intellectual leadership: creating direction, intellectual standards, and community for ourselves and non-SDev researchers who identify with and emulate what we do. This includes others in our intellectual orbit, such as the students of SDev graduates and non-SDevers that we have connected with—sometimes through co-authorship or other research partnerships. In addition to these groups, there are people around the world who see the work we do and want to join our community, but do not know how. For example, junior researchers often ask, “How do you do what you do and still get a job?” Often we do not have a clear answer, and many of these individuals give up on pursuing work they are passionate about in the name of self-preservation. This is a tragedy we can solve. In the long run, this requires departments and journals that can create and enforce their own objectives, standards, and culture. (Call that Stage 4.) But before that, we need to have a field that is coherent and externally recognizable.

Toward this goal, we are volunteering to start a new (for now, “invite-only”) Seminar on Planetary Management. The goal is to create an intellectual space to share and discuss creative, cutting-edge, goal-oriented research that draws from multiple fields and tackles global policy problems. In particular, we are trying to create a home for interdisciplinary research that might not be fully appreciated or critiqued in more traditional disciplinary seminars. (For example, we will give priority to talks that would not fit into a normal disciplinary seminar.) We hope that the research presented will be of the highest quality and that the full depth of the material will be presented, rather than having key aspects of it simplified for the audience (e.g., we hope nobody ever says, “this half of the paper is a black box you don’t need to worry about”). We also aim to foster a positive and collaborative environment in which we critique each other’s work constructively.

We are starting out by inviting (1) all current SDev students and SDev alumni, as well as (2) all students and research teams of SDev alumni. In this way, this community will serve as the group’s core—setting the culture and tone—while also expanding it to allow those we train and work with to participate in and integrate into this community. Eventually, we hope to expand this circle; the seminar’s name avoids SDev branding in anticipation of this.

The one-hour seminar will be research-focused: 40-minute talks; 20 minutes of questions. We welcome alumni who are practitioners or who are in the private sector, although we ask that all talks have a research focus. For now, the talks will not be recorded and the seminar will be invite-only, so it should be more-or-less “safe” to share unpublished work. As we expand, we might revisit these details.

We also want to make space for people to share the personal elements of what they go through professionally and their vision for our emerging field. The last SusDeveR conference revealed strong demand for this from younger cohorts and current students. To meet this demand, we will open up the virtual seminar room 30 minutes prior to the scheduled talk for voluntary discussion sessions. These sessions will be semi-structured (and hopefully fun)—for example, we may ask subgroups of the community, such as current postdocs, to share a bit about themselves and/or insights/questions from their experiences.

We have tried to pick a time that will be accessible (albeit perhaps annoying) for people all over the world. This is a compromise for pretty much everyone, but we hope that attendance will be worth it. We plan to hold the seminar at 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET on the first Wednesday of every month. This allows people in East Asia to join late in the evening, while people in the Central European time zone can join 5–6 p.m. In the U.S., people on the West Coast can join 8–9 a.m.

To get us started, we have already scheduled the first three speakers:

4 November - Anna Tompsett, Hannah Druckenmiller & Luna Huang: “Machine Learning with Pre-Satellite Satellite Imagery”

2 December - Sandra Baquié: “The Negative Externality of Prescriptions on Antibiotic Effectiveness”

6 January - Kyle Meng: “The Global Health Consequences of Stand-Up Paddle Boarding”

If you have work you would like to present, indicate this on the seminar registration form and we will work to slot you in for a future talk.

VERY IMPORTANT: We will be making a new email list for the seminar (both so we don’t spam this one and so we can add new, non-SDev people). In order to accept this invitation, you must go here and register. You may pass this link on to your students or research team (e.g., members of your research lab that are not students). For now, we ask that you do not distribute it beyond this group. Details for joining each seminar and calendar invites will be sent only to people on the registered list and should not be shared.

We welcome comments about this plan on the registration page. We will discuss the (perhaps uncomfortable) concept of “planetary management” at the first meeting ;)

In the future, we hope to grow the seminar and community by inviting non-SDev researchers to participate, but we will keep this smaller core group for now until we get the swing of things.

We are very excited and hope that you are able to participate.

We look forward to seeing you on 4 November at 10:30 a.m. ET (for a pre-talk discussion) or at 11 a.m. ET for Anna/Hannah/Luna’s talk!

Sincerely,

Andrew, Kimberly, and Sol

P.S.: Don’t forget to register here!