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NEW deadline for applications: 31 March 2023



Call for Applications



The Enrico Fermi Research Centre - CREF (Rome) and UNU-MERIT (Maastricht), in collaboration with the Young Scholar Initiative of the Institute of New Economic Thinking are now calling for submissions to the first Economic Fitness and Complexity spring school, which will be held on June 5-9, 2023 in Rome, Italy. The school will take place at the Enrico Fermi Research Centre, the historical building of Enrico Fermi’s group, right in the heart of Rome.


The school is an extensive introduction to the economic complexity framework, with theoretical and practical lessons. The first three days will focus on theoretical and practical classes covering the following topics: economic complexity measurement, network theory, machine learning, measurement of relatedness. Theoretical lectures will be followed by coding labs, where participants will have the chance to apply the methodologies introduced in class, and to carry out assigned group projects, focusing on the school core themes. For the last two days of the school, many world-wide renowned scholars have been invited to present their frontier research linking economic complexity with economic development, economic geography, labour economics, sustainability, economics of science, and innovation policy. Please see here the full list of speakers and the tentative programme. 


The spring school is open to postgraduate students, early-career researchers and practitioners from any area and discipline. Applicants will be required to submit an application using the registration form, where they will be asked to upload a CV and a short statement (max 5000 characters) indicating how the school relates to their research interests, and in which way they think they may benefit from the programme. 


Please note that we will be able to accommodate a maximum of 40 participants. The fee will be of 350 EUR for PhD students and early-career researchers (postdocs), and 500 EUR for all other participants. The fee includes lunches and coffee breaks during the five days of the school. Selected participants with no access to funding from their institutions may be able to apply for one of the 10 travel stipend of 300 USD each offered by YSI-INET. If you intend to apply for a travel stipend, please indicate it in your application using the application form. Successful applicants will be evaluated and notified by the organising committee. You will also be asked to sign up for the social dinner, that will take place on June 8th (20 EUR).



Suggested pre-requisites


The school is open to postgraduate students, early-career researchers and practitioners from all disciplines who are interested in applying economic complexity methods in their research. As the coding labs will be conducted using Python, we recommend participants to have basic knowledge of this programming language. If you have never used Python before, these resources may be useful:


Google's Python Class: https://developers.google.com/edu/python 

Datacamp: https://app.datacamp.com/learn/courses/intro-to-python-for-data-science 


Please not that several free resources are available on the internet. Moreover, the labs will be carried out Jupyter notebooks. More can be found here: https://jupyter.org/.

 


Key dates