Theme: Navigating uncertainty, managing instability, and crafting futures together

We face an array of unprecedented and interconnected global challenges ranging from the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, overconsumption of natural resources, proliferation of misinformation, and increasing socio-economic and epistemic divides. Tensions are rising, and political and economic systems are being tested.

Systems scientists are uniquely positioned to help understand the underlying dynamic complexities cutting across social, economic, material, and informational realms. We can combine our best hard and soft skills, and create networks, partnerships, and alliances—within and beyond our fields—to inform policies and interventions addressing key societal challenges and opportunities.

ISDC 2026 welcomes any submissions from researchers, students, educators, and practitioners using system dynamics in any application area, both work-in-progress and completed. We particularly encourage papers that address societal challenges, present novel approaches for analyzing these, or clarify our roles and responsibilities as systems scientists. We invite work that draws upon the experience within our field and showcases its rigor, as well as that challenges what needs to be questioned in order to craft better futures.

1 Program

The program includes plenary presentations that showcase important work in the field, parallel and poster sessions that present the most current research and applications, work-in-progress sessions to exhibit upcoming research, and a full day of skill-building workshops covering topics from basic software use to advanced analysis techniques. Panel discussions, special interest group sessions, student colloquia, vendor exhibits, and demonstrations round out the program. The conference schedule provides time for social and professional interaction.

2 Areas of Interest

Submit your work in business and strategy, diversity, economics, environment and resources, health, learning and teaching, operations, methodology, psychology and human behavior, public policy, stakeholder engagement, security, stability and resilience, transport and mobility.

3 Submission

Please submit your contributions between 21 January and 18 March 2026. We accept a number of contribution types:

-Research papers.
-Practitioner applications.
-Work in progress descriptions.
-Workshop proposals.
-Other session proposals such as panels or strongly themed parallel sessions.

The 2026 conference program will include invited and contributed sessions. Special proposals for plenary or parallel sessions, panel discussions, and other pre- or post-conference activities are encouraged. If you have ideas for sessions and workshops focused on practical issues, please contact us. Proposals should be sent to: progchair@systemdynamics.org.

For general conference questions, please email conference@systemdynamics.org.

ISDC proceedings don't exclude authors from submitting work to a journal. Authors can submit work to ISDC that has been submitted to other conferences.

You can find more information here: https://systemdynamics.org/submission-instructions/#submission-types.

4 The Location

The conference will take place in Delft, Netherlands, as well as virtually. The city of Delft is known for its historic charm, innovative spirit, and strong academic and research institutions.

Delft is easily accessible by train from major Dutch cities and from Schiphol Airport. The city is known for its canals, Delft Blue pottery, and as the home of the renowned Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). With a walkable city center and a welcoming atmosphere, Delft provides an ideal setting for the conference.

We hope you can join us there!

Program Chairs

Biographies

Hyunjung Kim is a professor in the Department of Management at California State University, Chico. She received her Ph.D. in Public Administration from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany. Her research centers on developing qualitative methods to systematically elicit and represent stakeholder mental models, with application across diverse policy and management domains, including data-intensive organizations, public service delivery, higher education planning, and monetary policymaking. She teaches courses in strategic decision-making and system dynamics modeling.

David W. Lounsbury is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health and Associate Director of Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York. A community psychologist and systems scientist, his domestic and international research is directed toward implementation of health services interventions and community-based programs to prevent and control of chronic health conditions—including substance abuse disorder, tobacco dependency, cancer, diabetes/obesity, HIV/AIDS, and dementia—with the aim of improving care quality for medically underserved populations. He completed a PhD in Ecological-Community Psychology and Urban Studies at Michigan State University and post-doctoral training in Psycho-Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Jeroen Struben is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at Emlyon Business School. He studies market formation processes—over-time interactions across stakeholders working through social and material adoption challenges—with a focus on sustainable consumption and production. Applications include among others sustainable mobility and nutritious food. In addition, Jeroen studies societal transformation problems including of overcoming persistent inequality. He tackles these problems using methods of computational modeling and simulation, and empirical analysis of large spatiotemporal datasets. Jeroen holds a PhD in System Dynamics from MIT's Sloan School of Management and an MSc in Physics from Delft University of Technology.