Our focus this year is to honor our friend and colleague, Charlie Doering, who passed away in May 2021. Charlie served as CSCS Director for six years where he presided over a period of expansion in our undergraduate curriculum and created a supportive community of interdisciplinary faculty and scholars.
While our 'grand hope' is to have a Charlie Doering Postdoctoral Position funded at CSCS we also encourage anyone who felt kinship with Charlie to give any amount to be a part of this memorial effort.
As director, Charlie expanded the postdoctoral program in Complex Systems, recruiting multiple postdoctoral fellows exploring emergent behavior in complex systems, in areas ranging from ecology and evolution, to the dynamics of culture and language change, to understanding the social origins of Bitcoin worth, to the emergence of multimodal distributions in coupled oscillator systems.
Your donation to the Charlie Doering Strategic Fund will help support the next generation of complex systems scholars. These postdoctoral research fellows don’t necessarily fit in a traditional discipline but find a place in our center where they can engage with students and address the complex, interconnected issues of our time.
Visit the Complex Systems Giving Blueday page here. The site will become active on March 16, 2022 at 12:01 am. If you want the chance of 'supercharging' your donation, give between 4:00-5:00pm on March 16, as the 'non-degree granting unit' with the most donations during that hour will 'win' extra $$ toward their fund.
We learned the value of honoring a memory when we established the Rick Riolo Memorial Fund Prize after his death in 2018. In the fall of 2021 we awarded the first annual Rick Riolo Memorial Fund Prize to an undergraduate student. It was so great to 'revisit Rick' as we promoted the prize competition and evaluated the submissions. (Donations to the RRMF can also be made on Giving Blueday and anytime HERE.)
We are looking forward to having a lasting legacy of Charlie in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems.
Learn more about the University of Michigan Giving Blueday here.
How does it work? Each unit participating in UM Giving Blueday has their own webpage that will start accepting donations at 12:01 am on Wednesday, March 16, 2022. There are various matching programs through the University and LSA specifically - a student matching program and first time donor matching program - that will take place throughout the day as well as hourly challenges, etc..
All donations to the fund on Giving Blueday are collected online on March 16.
