Dave Zelinka is a data-driven interdisciplinary engineer, systems thinker, & complexity scientist who creates insight from chaos. His passion is to understand & address humankind’s most pressing issues, including sustainable energy, climate change, international development, conflict, peacebuilding, corruption, urbanization. He is the Founder & CEO of Civitas Systems, a consulting company merging systems approaches and data science to solve problems in complex systems—turning his passion into a life-long career.Dave attained a PhD in Civil Systems & a second MS in Global Engineering in under three years from the Mortenson Center for Global Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He holds a MS in environmental & sustainability engineering from the University of Colorado, Denver and a BS in environmental & ecological engineering from Purdue University.As a consultant, he provides expertise & research support as a systems thinking expert & graph data scientist for various justice, governance, and democracy projects in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He recently concluded a postdoctoral research project on the effect of climate & energy policy of the global electricity sector as a data scientist and geospatial analyst. Dave was an affiliate professor at Metropolitan State University, where he created & taught a course in systems engineering & industrial ecology. While a doctoral student, he spent four months in Israel performing fieldwork to understand the use of household-scale wastewater treatment systems and study the conflict from a hydropolitical perspective. As a master’s student, he was a technical and policy analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, forwarding the commercialization of sustainable energy in various states across the country and researching the renewable energy potential of Caribbean countries.His research specializes in applied complexity science, system dynamics, network analysis, sustainable development, sociopolitical systems, data science, the FEW nexus, grounded theory, systems ontology, sustainable energy, & peace engineering. His work has been presented in conferences by the United Nations, System Dynamics Society, American Society for Engineering Education, & the International Sustainable Development Research Society. His research has been published in the International Journal of System Dynamics Applications; the Handbook of Research on Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Complex Systems; and the Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.