Complex Risk Seminar

Welcome to the Complex Risk Seminar series!

Today’s risks are not isolated—they are compounding, cascading, and concurrent, spanning physical hazards, social systems, and technological infrastructures. Traditional approaches struggle to keep pace with this interconnected landscape.

Risk science is the effort to understand hazards and their impacts in ways that inform real decisions. But risk science, as it has been practiced, is underdeveloped for our moment. We need approaches that embrace complexity, uncertainty, and paradox.

Complex Risk Science is one such emerging approach. It draws from complexity science, resilience thinking, and critical transitions research to explore how interconnections between hazards and infrastructures reshape risk itself.

This (experimental) seminar series convenes people who rarely meet—scientists, practitioners, policymakers, and creators—to explore the science, practice, and implications of complex risk. It is a space for gathering, connecting, and discovering new ways of understanding and responding to the risks of our time. It builds on the foundation created during the Science Understanding from Data Science (SUDS) initiative conducted internally at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory between 2021-2024 and then emerged into a multi-institutional movement, supporting numerous ‘Horizons Initiatives.’

Watch the previous seminars on YouTube here.