Nearly 80 people, including authorities of the Faculty of Government and Medicine, professors, students of the Universidad del Desarrollo, as well as family and friends, were present at the graduation ceremony of the graduates of the Doctorate in Social Complexity Sciences of the CICS and two doctoral students of Medicine.
With emotional speeches, both the Rector of the Universidad del Desarrollo, Federico Valdés, and the Dean of the Faculty of Government, Eugenio Guzmán, highlighted the importance of Doctorates for the University. “We set out as innovation axes of our doctoral training project, focusing on emerging and relevant issues, of little development in the country and in the region; and the generation of skills in our students to be inserted not only in the academic world of research, but in the productive world and the company’s, “said Valdés. Likewise, Guzmán stressed the importance of this “cycle of efforts and work for academic life” by those who achieved the highest degree that a university can provide.
In the same way, the first Doctor of the University and also of the Doctorate Program in Social Complexity Sciences, Cristian Candia-Castro, pointed out that “(…) what filled me with energy to continue, was the access to information and knowledge of first level that exists in the CICS and this is, basically, by the practical use of the concept of complex networks. One of the concrete proposals is to make available to students the extensive active and functional network of collaboration that the Center has. So, the CICS is concerned to maintain these constant links with research centers of excellence where knowledge of first source is found.” He added that “(…) the proposals of value of the Center and the Doctorate, in particular, are very difficult to find in any other doctoral program in Latin America and, in general, in the world. “
For Jorge Castillo, the completion of the Doctorate in Social Complexity Sciences was also an enriching experience: “(…) my research directors gave us freedom and space to generate creativity around the topics we wanted to investigate and that helped me because I come from a school (…) much more conservative, where everything was like in a ‘box’, from which you could not leave. And here was the opposite: ‘get out of that box, explore, investigate, see what happens’, and that’s what I was looking for in a doctorate program,” he concluded.
Our graduates
Cristian Candia-Castro, Physical Engineer at the Universidad de Concepción, joined in 2014, forming part of the first generation of doctoral students participating in this program. He completed two successful internships abroad: one at the MIT in the United States, together with researcher César Hidalgo; Later, he spent 6 months at Northeastern University working with Albert-László Barabási, who created the area of complex systems. As of August of this year, Dr. Candia will enter the prestigious Kellogg School of Management, one of the best business schools in the world.
Jorge Castillo Sepúlveda, Mathematical Civil Engineer from the Universidad de Concepción, also joined the Doctorate in Social Complexity Sciences in 2014. His research areas were focused on transitions in evolution, cultural evolution, theory and evolution of complexity, the analysis of social networks and mathematical modeling. Currently, the now PhD in Social Complexity Sciences works in Z Data Lab, performing as data scientist, performing tasks of analysis and processing of databases, development of analytical tools, research in quantitative analysis and mathematical modeling.
