Join us in Wellington, New Zealand for the Capital City Complex Systems Symposium, 24-25 February 2026.
Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
The third Capital City Complex Systems Symposium brings together leading researchers and practitioners working on complex systems.
Following the success of previous events in 2023 and 2024, the symposium fosters interdisciplinary collaboration in complex systems research across natural and social sciences, engineering, arts and humanities.
A core theme of the symposium is the interweaving of the latest advances in complex systems science with the concerns of communities, business and policy around how to ensure prosperous, resilient, equitable and just democratic life in a time of increasing uncertainty due to grand challenges such as climate change, biodiversity and wellbeing.
The symposium will feature keynote speeches from international and local guests, panel discussions and talks on topics such as collective intelligence, network science, social dynamics, digital democracy, urban systems, ecological systems, health systems, and more.
The Capital City Complex Systems Symposium is a unique opportunity to learn from experts, share your work, network with peers, and discover new perspectives on complex systems. Whether you are a seasoned researcher or a newcomer to the field, you will find something valuable and inspiring at this symposium.
The Capital City Complex Systems Symposium 2026 will be held from 24-25 February 2026 at the Tiakiwai Conference Centre in the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington, New Zealand.
Carl Bergstrom
Carl Bergstrom is a professor of biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in mathematical evolutionary biology, Carl addresses a broad range of problems across natural and social sciences with a unifying theme of how information flows. Within biology, Carl studies problems such as how communication evolves and how natural selection puts information into the genome. In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. In network science, he explores how to extract the relevant information from massive networks comprising tens of millions of nodes, and how information flows through networks of this scale. Most recently he has started to focus on how social media and large language models facilitate the spread of disinformation, with a particular focus on what we as educators can do to stem this accursed tide.
Diane Finegood
Diane Finegood is a professor and fellow at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. She is an internationally recognised scholar with work in a range of disciplines including pathogenesis diabetes, application of mathematical modelling to physiological systems, cross sector partnership, knowledge mobilisation, and systems thinking. Diane’s current passion is for the application of systems thinking and dialogue to address complex problems across a broad range of topics, with a particular focus on health systems and public health. Twenty years of thinking and learning about approaches that embrace complexity led to her build the Complex Systems Frameworks Collection alongside illustrator Sam Bradd.
To be announced.
To be announced.
Organising committee
- Associate Professor Anna Matheson (co-chair)
- Michael Howden (co-chair)
- Associate Professor Cilla Wehi
- Dr Lisa Pilkington
- Dr Bernardo Buarque
- Zainab Rizvi
- Jonathan Burgess (communications)
- Shreya Rao (operations)
To be announced.
Programme committee
To be announced.