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Interdisciplinarity

Solving the world’s complex problems will be so much harder if higher education is confined to disciplinary silos. Universities must encourage work across departments to develop creative and innovative answers to global challenges.

During the 2017-18 academic year, we took a long, hard look at ourselves. The distinctive lines of the university had become rather hazy. Instead of focusing on the things we were really good at, we were trying to do too much. We needed to be louder and prouder about our academic strengths and tell a clearer story.Realising this, we regrouped around three colleges and 12 schools in place of five faculties and 26 departments. Admittedly, there were other, less cerebral drivers for our restructure, but agreeing and then inhabiting the best and truest version of our academic selves was a genuinely inspiring process.Knowing our strengthsOne of the University of Westminster’s strengths is research quality, attested by subsequent iterations of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), but we’re not equally fantastic at everything, and nor do we expect to be. As we redrew some of our fuzzy lines, we looked at our research performance indicators and then consulted widely.Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our partsDeveloping interdisciplinary courses for tomorrow’s scholarsCampus webinar: The evolution and innovation of interdisciplinarityWhat was really striking was the unanimity in the domains of research excellence at Westminster, and they were straightforward to describe: arts, communication and culture; health innovation and well-being; sustainable cities and the urban environment. We take great pride in our diversity as a community and in our commitment to inclusivity, and we agreed that diversity and inclusion should be more than just a Westminster characteristic; it must be core business. And then there were four.How to bring these four areas of research strength to life? Other universities describe research themes or interdisciplinary areas or grand challenges or centres of excellence. For us the key thing is the people – people coming together from across the university and beyond to share their passion, work out solutions together and develop new projects. So, we established our four research communities.The communities do not have a fixed membership but rather bring people together around particular problems or opportunities. Each one has an academic lead, and they receive focused support from our Research and KE Office, as well as internal funding. They exist in a landscape that includes research centres and groups and various other constellations of research activity, but they have a distinctive role to&nbsp;play.Find your communityIf our research centres are hubs, the communities are the spokes, making links between groups of researchers and creating a sort of town square where they can meet. The communities actively pursue multidisciplinary project development, and they are driven by actual current funding opportunities as well as by possible future fundable partnerships. They are an explicit commitment in our 2022-29 research and KE strategy (Making a&nbsp;Difference), so, unlike research themes, we’re not going to keep reinventing them. Indeed, the first bullet point on the first page of the strategy states: “By 2029 we will be at the forefront of research and KE globally”, in the four community spaces.While the distinctive role of the communities may be crystal clear to those of us leading our research endeavour, to others their purpose may be harder to understand. How are they different from research centres or academic schools? Why are they not offering more grants? It is true that they are not equally valuable to everyone, and that is totally fine, but there are those for whom the communities do provide what other bits of the research and KE architecture don’t. The communities are matchmakers.For those, particularly mid-career researchers, whose research endeavour needs a lift, new inspiration, the chance to work with new collaborators or to develop connections beyond the immediate disciplinary home, the communities offer those connections.For those wanting a space for more speculative discussion or who are looking for potential impact partners, or who are looking to raise the profile of their work beyond their home school, the communities offer something special. We have colleagues, including PGRs, who, because of the distinctiveness of their research feel like they don’t naturally belong to any one research centre, but who have found a home in one of the more fluid and diverse communities. And they have brought people together to support research in other ways, via grant-writing workshops, writing retreats, external visits and the like.Our communities have been operating for six years, and there are six years until the end of our current strategy period. All four communities have new leads as of now (either permanent or covering a colleague’s leave), so we are taking the opportunity of a soft relaunch, re-inking some fuzzy edges, but what is clear is that our research communities have served us well, and I’m sure they will continue to do&nbsp;so.Andrew Linn is deputy vice-chancellor for research and knowledge exchange at the University of Westminster.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

How to achieve interdisciplinarity? Focus on the people

Restructuring research domains around four communities allowed academics to find their natural home, writes Andrew Linn. Here’s how to do it

How to achieve interdisciplinary research? Focus on the people

Graduates are increasingly entering a work landscape that demands agility, flexibility and a diverse skill set, and as a result, the value of interdisciplinary education is on the rise. Universities are seeking out ways to expand students’ horizons beyond a discipline-specific degree, creating pathways for students to tackle some of the complex challenges they are likely to face in their future careers.LSE100 is the flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all undergraduate students at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 2010, we have been building our students’ capacity to tackle multidimensional problems through research-rich education, giving them the opportunity to explore transformative global challenges in collaboration with their peers and leading academics from across the university.Making group work work: how to enable successful student collaborationInterdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it workBuilding the future: the case for inter-faculty learningThe course has evolved significantly since its creation. We shifted its mode of delivery away from face-to-face lectures and towards a flipped classroom format that prioritises collaborative, interactive seminars to maximise student engagement. Teaching LSE100 to more than 20,000 undergraduates over the past decade has offered some important lessons for designing an interdisciplinary course – one that can develop students’ abilities to embrace complexity, as they work to solve the world’s most pressing issues.Engage students with the breadth of academic researchOne of our core aims at LSE100 is to bring students into the heart of the LSE tradition of thinking like a social scientist, inviting them to embrace the School’s motto of “understanding the causes of things for the betterment of society”. Key to this goal is showcasing the research of LSE academics. As part of the course, we invite contributions from researchers across the university, filming short interviews to highlight their findings and impact, which students then watch as part of their preparation for LSE100 seminars. Engaging students with the breadth of academic research is a valuable way to develop skills in synthesising and integrating insights from a wide range of perspectives, which is a core competency of interdisciplinary learning.Signpost the value of different perspectivesIn allocating students to LSE100 seminars, we work with our timetabling colleagues to ensure there is as much diversity of perspective in the classroom as possible. The best conversations happen when students are introduced to an idea or argument, then draw on their disciplinary knowledge to interrogate it. Hearing what a philosopher, lawyer, statistician, anthropologist, and political scientist have to say about the concept of fairness, for example, is hugely valuable for our students.&nbsp;This exposure to new perspectives is accompanied by clear signposting throughout the course when students are engaging with different disciplines. Knowing what a sociological perspective on markets might look like, and how it differs from an economic one, is often an eye-opening experience for first-year undergraduates in thinking beyond the boundaries of their chosen degree.Develop students’ abilities to tackle wicked problemsWe design LSE100 around three complex global challenges, which we argue require an interdisciplinary perspective to meaningfully address. The challenges change over time, and students are given the opportunity to choose the challenge they’re most interested in. Our current challenges (How can we control AI? How can we create a fair society? How can we transform our climate futures?) can all be considered what design theorists Rittel and Webber identified as “wicked problems” – multifaceted, complex problems with no one straightforward solution.&nbsp;Using a wicked problems framing highlights the value of an interdisciplinary approach, expanding students’ toolbox for how to tackle these thorny issues. Students are empowered to consider how they would lead and make change in a world of wicked problems, drawing not only on their disciplinary knowledge but on the theories, methods and concepts offered by fields other than their own.Introducing the tools of interdisciplinary thinkingIn thinking about the design of an interdisciplinary offering, it may be tempting to fall into a trap of multidisciplinarity – showcasing the contributions of many disciplines, but not reaching a truly interdisciplinary space where students can synthesise and integrate these insights. One way to avoid this pitfall is to draw on interdisciplinary frameworks and methods, giving students the tools they need to do interdisciplinary investigation.&nbsp;In LSE100, we develop students’ skills in systems thinking with this goal in mind. Systems thinking, itself an interdisciplinary field, invites students to think not just about individual components of systems but the system itself, as well as its connections. Introducing students to feedback loops, systems mapping and the importance of interconnectedness gives them a way to tackle wicked problems, breaking down challenges into essential parts of a complex system.Embracing complexity through interdisciplinary learning can be a hugely rewarding experience for students, helping prepare them effectively for the world of work. Alongside developing disciplinary expertise and knowledge, we should strive to train our students to think creatively and widely, both when working individually and as part of a team, aiming to create something greater than the sum of its parts.Jillian Terry is associate professor (education) and co-director of LSE100 at the London School of Economics and Political Science.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Embrace complexity with interdisciplinary education 

The real world is complicated. Let’s give our students the tools to take it on with interdisciplinary education

Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our parts

Interdisciplinarity was reportedly first conceived in the 1930s when it appeared in a notice about the development of the Social Science Research Council in The Journal of Educational Sociology. Nearly a century on, we are still grappling with how best to design interdisciplinary courses.&nbsp;In our increasingly complex world, students need to be able to work across, between and with multiple disciplines to tackle global challenges, from the climate crisis to increasing inequalities. In response, many of our institutions are developing new degree programmes and building and repurposing to make new learning spaces. But how does this work in practice?UCL’s new campus, UCL East, serves as an interesting case study for developing an institutional approach to launching interdisciplinary courses. After multiple consultations, evaluations, market research and the kind of scrutiny that pertains to any large-scale university investment, nearly 60 new and nearly new degree programmes were born.&nbsp;Focus on academic leadership: UCL East’s ground-up approachOne driver of success has been the conception of the new campus as academically led from the outset. Faculties were invited to submit proposals on research activities, centres and degree programmes, alongside the focus on developing new learning spaces.&nbsp;Use engagement with research as a driver for course innovation&nbsp;Using research as a driver for the creation of new courses works well to engage academics. It can allow their passion for their subject area to shine through, creating dynamism and energy to drive forward programme development. There will always be some academics who are adamant that their idea for a programme is absolutely what is needed right here, right now. It is important, however, to strike a balance between the innovation that comes with interdisciplinary drivers and risk-taking. This can be done by taking a holistic view of new programmes and considering them from multiple perspectives. For example, testing early ideas with existing students, seeking input from potential employers and exploring what competitors are doing.&nbsp;Resources for higher education professionals on InterdisciplinarityCampus webinar: the evolution and innovation of interdisciplinarityPractical strategies for overcoming challenges in interdisciplinary project-based learningMitigate your risks&nbsp;Using research as a driver in the creation of new courses is no easy feat. It involves the kinds of risks associated with what Paul Coyle and Dave Roberts called Type B Courses, a new programme introduced by a university that is innovative and thus has few if any directly competitive courses across the UK sector. In contrast, Type A Courses are programmes introduced by a university that are new to the institution but are widely available across the UK sector.&nbsp;Programmes that fall into the first category often face more challenges in their development journey, so it is useful to understand this at the beginning of the process so the risks can be mitigated to some extent – or at least anticipated. For example, a new interdisciplinary programme operating in a new subject area might benefit from running some pilot modules or taster sessions so that ideas can be tested and socialised before the programme is launched. This can reassure senior management that this programme is a risk worth taking, but also begins to develop interest and gives the opportunity to refine what is planned. Key to decision-making is having embedded and empowered academic leadership throughout the programme. In practice, engaging academics also means enabling different versions of interdisciplinarity to develop and navigate some of the tensions that may surface.Encourage collaborative course designBy using our interdisciplinary research power as a driver for new courses, UCL, like other universities with large-scale research activity, can encompass a diverse integration of ideas and discourse that is inherently interdisciplinary. A key component of this research-based course design is to draw on and encourage existing collaborations between faculties, departments and disciplines.&nbsp;It is also important to work with what your institution already does really well and build on this for course development. Ultimately, students need to take ownership of the interdisciplinary approaches for themselves, but this cannot happen if the connections are too abstract. This is especially true for undergraduate degrees.&nbsp;Holding creative workshops where potential cross-departmental teams can work together on the vision for a programme early on in the developmental process works well, especially when the focus is on the hearts and minds of interdisciplinary students. Often, this kind of gathering results in thematic strands in a course, but also the development of additional modules whose sole intention is to help students connect the ideas across a year of study.Lastly, we’ve also found that it is important that the role of new programme development does not exist in a vacuum and that departments are encouraged to develop modules that many students across a programme might share. This also offers an alternative approach to institutions that are not building new campuses or making major additions to their portfolios. A number of universities now have shared modules in which students from across many disciplines can come together around shared themes such as sustainability, entrepreneurship and community-based learning. Examples are Manchester’s University College for Interdisciplinary Learning and Leeds University's “discovery modules”.This is the first in a two-part series on embedding interdisciplinarity into teaching and learning. Part two of this resource will focus on practical approaches to interdisciplinary course design.Anne Preston is an associate professor in interdisciplinary practice and media communities and Katherine Fletcher is interim director of academic strategy development at University College London.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Developing interdisciplinary courses for tomorrow’s scholars

Many universities are developing new interdisciplinary degree programmes to prepare students for working across sectors on complex issues. But how can we engage faculty in this whole-institution approach?

Developing students’ skills in effective collaboration, particularly as a member of a diverse and interdisciplinary team, is a critical area of interest in higher education. Yet anxieties about group work and team projects are rife, with educators’ workloads often weighed down by complex administrative and organisational tasks. This is alongside the worries of equity of contribution and the risk of non-participation, which require careful managing by teachers.At LSE100, the flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all first-year undergraduates at LSE, we facilitate a term-long interdisciplinary group research project for more than 1,800 students each academic year. The project requires students to work in multidisciplinary teams and propose a positive change in relation to a complex global challenge – for instance, how can we regulate the development of AI-driven weapons? How can we incentivise the use of green transport in rural areas? How can we tackle educational inequalities between public and private schools?&nbsp;Interdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it workFostering interdisciplinary learning in large-scale doctoral programmesDesigning postgraduate education as a means of sharing and developing academic and professional knowledgeStudents bring their own disciplinary expertise to the project, and are expected to work collaboratively with their team to synthesise insights from across the social sciences to deliver a presentation and digital report. With nearly 400 group projects running simultaneously, we’ve devised a range of strategies to support students through the process of collaboration.Establish a baseline for collaborative successA first step teams take when embarking on the LSE100 group project is develop a team charter. This activity uses simple prompts to invite students into a conversation with their teammates about their expectations for collaboration. The prompts focus on several areas, including:Communication: format, frequency, expectation of response time&nbsp;Team meetings: hybridity, agenda-setting, note-taking&nbsp;Roles and responsibilities: interests, expertise, time framesAll of these encourage students to have a frank and honest dialogue with their team members from the outset of the project.&nbsp;In addition to making space for this valuable conversation, a team charter also helps to establish a written record for the group to refer back to. If a group member misses a deadline, acts inappropriately in a meeting or fails to fulfil their responsibilities to their team, both students and teachers can draw on the team charter as an accountability mechanism, using it as a starting point for further conversation and resetting of expectations.Building confidence in working as a teamAll too often, group projects rely solely on students’ existing knowledge or prior experiences of collaboration when considering how students will work together. In LSE100, we have worked to embed a range of team-working skills into students’ preparation for each group project seminar. This is especially important for our first-year undergraduates, many of whom have never been part of a group project before arriving at university.&nbsp;During the first half of the project, students learn about techniques for delegating roles in a team, how to build consensus and methods for effective team communication. The second half of the project focuses more concretely on project delivery, developing students’ skills in project management and offering frameworks for conflict resolution in difficult group situations. By foregrounding these elements in our course materials, students are better equipped to collaborate with each other. Instead of relying on their instincts, they can use the evidence-based approaches they’ve encountered in preparing for their seminars.A scaffolded approach to project deliveryWhile there is certainly value in group projects that take place entirely outside the classroom, the LSE100 project is designed to maximise students’ engagement with the project during their scheduled seminar time. In group project seminars, students sit with their team members and work through a structured set of tasks or activities which have key project deliverables attached to them.&nbsp;For instance, the first seminar asks groups to identify the specific focus of their project through activities that support them in narrowing down their topic and identifying relevant information. Further seminars invite groups to choose a target audience for their project, identify key stakeholders, outline their proposal and pinpoint possible obstacles.&nbsp;With each seminar, teams are able to draft a section of their project. This promotes a step-by-step approach and helps groups avoid feeling overwhelmed when the project deadline nears. Scaffolding groups’ work in this way also lets teachers take on an important supervisory role, checking in with teams about their progress and identifying any sticking points where individual students or groups may be struggling.Designing structured seminars for group project work also enables the inclusion of meaningful peer feedback opportunities. During LSE100 seminars, groups regularly meet each other to hear about their projects, act as “critical friends” and test out new ideas with their peers before finalising them for submission. Giving groups the opportunity to learn about each other’s work-in-progress, rather than solely the final product, incentivises collaboration and sharing of perspectives which can be hugely valuable for student teams.While team working can often raise new and unexpected challenges for both students and educators, our approaches have helped ensure that LSE100 students are able to make meaningful progress and work effectively as part of a diverse and interdisciplinary team. Feedback from students indicates that the group project is often their favourite part of their LSE100 experience, helping them develop essential skills for their future studies and beyond.Jillian Terry is associate professor (education) and co-director of LSE100 at the London School of Economics and Political Science.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the&nbsp;THE Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Making group work work

How can we help students collaborate without weighing down staff with extra admin? First-year interdisciplinary research projects could be the answer

Making group work work: how to enable successful student collaboration

Interdisciplinary teams face specific challenges, not least of which is the difficulty of establishing a shared vision among sometimes fundamentally different academic disciplines that all speak their own language. For example, talking about an agent&nbsp;means one thing to a computer modeller and something different to a software engineer.Compromising on disciplinary desirables to elevate the overall quality of the synthesis represents another challenge. This requires researchers to acknowledge difficult positionalities and readiness to retreat from ownership of activities so structural inequalities can be addressed.Then there’s who is credited for what when it comes to outputs and managing scholarly peer review of interdisciplinary research for publication or funding. Evaluation becomes difficult when multiple disciplinary standards and criteria need to be reconciled. Interdisciplinary research, even when delivered successfully, often makes slow progress, and longer publication and citation times can mean depressed productivity (with implications for career progression), which can leave a sense of dissatisfaction among interdisciplinary researchers.Interdisciplinary ‘prenups’ to overcome barriers in interdisciplinary research&nbsp;A bold approach to the challenges of interdisciplinary research could be interdisciplinary “prenups”, as proposed in a recent article in EMBO Reports. An interdisciplinary team of researchers, including myself, offer practical guidelines to developing an interdisciplinary ecosystem, including targeting decision-making at the individual, team, organisation, funder and publisher levels.&nbsp;Read more advice and guidance on interdisciplinarityWhat are the key questions that help universities measure societal impact?All together now: how to write an interdisciplinary research proposalIn the article, the authors propose an agreement for interdisciplinary work as a bottom-up approach to mitigate some of the challenges of interdisciplinary research. This prenup would help to establish shared values, visions, objectives, risk appetites, communications protocols, publication strategies, intellectual property, academic impact, risks and opportunities. Creating a prenup would entail structured conversations among team members during the planning phase of the collaboration or project to identify reciprocal challenges and the mutual benefits to each discipline. Interdisciplinary teams can formalise the agreed outcomes of these discussions as foundational documents to govern decision-making, establish shared objectives and even resolve disputes. This will ensure researchers value each other and, especially, their contributions, rather than seeing interdisciplinary research as a set of transactions or a tick-box exercise.Another issue this will overcome concerns the order of authors on scientific articles, which reflects the contribution of each author to the project. While the order varies across disciplines and cultures, typically the first and last position carry the most weight, and order is a key measure of the authors’ contributions, which eventually influences significant decisions such as promotions, securing tenure or appropriation of research grants.&nbsp;Given that, in interdisciplinary teams, the contributions of individual members do not stack against each other in sharp relief (unlike in single-discipline teams, where this is relatively easy to determine), disagreements around authorships represent a recurring motif in interdisciplinary research. Prenups can develop and outline an equitable strategy that alternates first and last authorships in a way that those with substantial contributions get due credit. For example, a research project that integrated clinical, engineering, software and biomedical approaches and yielded a virtual asthma patient credited multiple authors as “first authors”, “senior authors” and “corresponding authors” to fairly represent the contributions of the team members.The prenup strategy was adopted by EVAL-FARMS: a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded interdisciplinary project that integrated methods from mathematics, engineering, microbial sciences, anthropology and geography to address antimicrobial resistance in agriculture. The prenup, especially, ensured that publications were handled more equitably across the team.Enhancing interdisciplinary researchIt is clear to academics, funders and policymakers that the biggest issues our world faces will not be solved by individual disciplines, but by collaborations across them. This requires a fundamental rethink at the multiple stakeholder levels, from academics, research institutes, funders and publishers of how interdisciplinary research is funded, conducted, published and measured, including the assessment of interdisciplinary researchers’ contributions.&nbsp;The proposal to introduce prenups is just one of the solutions proposed in the paper that outlines seven recommendations for researchers, institutions, publishers and funders to enhance interdisciplinary research and output. As the authors state: “The underlying truth is that interdisciplinary collaborations require additional time, a collective willingness to revisit and reflect, patience in stepping into the unfamiliar and even sacrifices for the greater good.” Despite these challenges and the interdisciplinary path being non-linear, the opportunities are plentiful and always rewarding.Himanshu Kaul is a Royal Academy of Engineering research fellow at the University of Leicester.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

A bottom-up approach could establish shared values, objectives, risk appetites and publication strategies as ways to mitigate challenges that hinder effective progress of interdisciplinary teams

Can academic prenups help overcome barriers to interdisciplinary research?

The academic world is often sorted into separate boxes, but the real-word problems we’re facing can’t be neatly filed away. How can we make interdisciplinarity work practically in both teaching and research? Our discussion includes advice on how to implement interdisciplinarity in teaching and research, what students get out of interdisciplinary work, the distinctions between multi- and transdisciplinary work and how they differ from interdisciplinarity, and how universities can promote interdisciplinary learning from the word go.Our panellists are:Louise Kuchel, deputy associate dean at the Faculty of Science, University of QueenslandRohan Walker, director of advanced training systems at the University of Newcastle, AustraliaKyle Jenkins, dean of creative arts at the University of Southern Queensland.All of our speakers are from Campus+ partner institutions. Campus+ is a unique opportunity to become a contributing partner to the resources, tools and advice published on Campus.Don’t forget to book your ticket to Campus Live ANZ, taking place on 26 and 27 September in Newcastle, Australia.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Campus webinar: the evolution of interdisciplinarity

Join three experts from Campus+ partner institutions in Australia as they discuss interdisciplinarity, how to implement it in teaching and research and why it’s important for the future


Campus webinar: The evolution and innovation of interdisciplinarity

Academic research often occurs in silos, but for some researchers, interdisciplinary collaboration is fundamental to satisfying their intellectual curiosity. Caitlin Maikawa is one of them. A Senior Schmidt Science Fellow and now&nbsp;an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Maikawa leads her own lab out of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering. The Maikawa Lab develops cutting-edge technologies with a number of clinical applications and comprises scientists from biology, material science, chemistry and medicine, all working as a close-knit team.“My engineering education emphasised the importance of bringing in people with different expertise and different stakeholders. It emphasised teamwork, and I think that made a lot of sense,” she says. “I grew up playing sports, specifically ice hockey, and through playing team sports I learnt the value of working together and everyone having a different role on the team.”Maikawa’s research career took off when she was a PhD student working on the development of dynamic polymer-based insulin formulations that could be deployed in an autonomous system for treating diabetes. These insulin formulations need to respond quickly to changes in glucose levels to be effective. “Having insulins with faster kinetics is important,” Maikawa says. “Diabetes treatment is heading towards autonomous artificial pancreas devices where you have an insulin-infusion pump paired with a glucose sensor. Using an algorithm, the information gathered from the glucose sensor can inform autonomous insulin dosing.”These projects are application-focused. They are designed to tackle clinical problems, and input from healthcare specialists working with patients was vital to their success. These conversations help steer the engineering and technological approach. They also inspire Maikawa to ask, “What’s next?” For her postdoctoral work, that meant a pivot to macro-scale devices for non-invasive treatment pathways and targeted drug delivery, investigating ways to develop a pill that could administer insulin or other protein therapies.“One of the key parts of my postdoc was thinking about how materials can respond to stimuli in the gastrointestinal tract and throughout the body. And how we can use materials that change in response to stimuli in the body like, for example, changes in glucose, to trigger more effective drug delivery,” she says.Today, Maikawa’s work pulls on all these threads, digging deeper into the clinical potential of material science and bioengineering to develop pills that could be taken orally and yet be super-targeted. Maikawa’s research group also explores new ways of monitoring disease in the gastrointestinal tract.&nbsp;“We can actually detect things that are local or specific to disease sites, so I am interested to see if we can develop new technologies that let us better and more easily monitor how our body is changing,” she says.&nbsp;Maikawa thinks the expertise of a microbiome specialist could advance this research. Her chances of finding one are good. Toronto takes proactive measures to foster an interdisciplinary research community, with forums for researchers to have conversations about shared interests and what they are working on. As Maikawa says, this is often how interdisciplinary collaborations start.Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.Find out more&nbsp;about Schmidt Science Fellows.

It takes many scientific perspectives to deliver new technologies that could revolutionise how we treat diabetes and monitor disease. At the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, research teams are applying their expertise to real-life clinical problems in search of innovations in bioengineering

Joint efforts propel transformative scientific discoveries

Joan, a senior technical staff member, posts in the technical staff Teams site that she is interested in exploring mentoring across the technician community. Would others like to participate? Colleagues respond positively and a small working group emerges. On the same site, a call is put out for a piece of kit needed for a student’s research. Offers quickly appear from other faculties.Harry is a newly arrived postdoctoral fellow. His colleague Julie, a lecturer, is helping induct him. Julie belongs to the early and emerging academic researcher network. She speaks enthusiastically about this local supportive community, encouraging Harry to sign up and join 400 of his peers. Harry joins, and immediately signs up for the colleague-led writing retreat. He also meets his faculty rep for a coffee.Colleen, a senior administrative professional, wants help to refocus the administrative community of practice (CoP) she has coordinated for some years. She recognises it has lost its original purpose and is no longer centred on its desired constituency. A plan to refocus on the core intent is developed with the support of the People and Culture unit. This includes defining membership and goals via a co-created charter.Joan, Harry and Colleen all have different CoP-related needs and experiences. What if the university could provide a common framework to support these networks?Supporting CoPs from set-up to self-sufficiencyAt the University of Canterbury, with the encouragement and support of our vice-chancellor and senior leaders, we recognise the value in supporting formalised pan-university communities of practice. These communities work across the organisation to facilitate boundary crossing and inter-unit collaboration. In our experience, such communities build trust, uncover and encourage appreciation of colleagues’ expertise, and support sharing of good practice leading to innovation. The collective power of cross-functional activities is recognised in the “people” strand of our strategy&nbsp;Tangata Tū, Tangata Ora.&nbsp;How to meet people on campusCommunities of practice: how to help them thriveUsing communities of practice to drive teaching innovationThis recognition has led to the development of a framework by People and Culture. This was deemed helpful to define a “pan-university community of practice” ensuring support was appropriately focused. The framework outlines support from set-up until self-sufficiency.It is early days, but some successes, challenges and lessons have emerged. Development and growth are occurring via constructive feedback and enthusiastic participation by members.A framework for university-wide communities of practiceOur framework has been designed to aid communities that desire additional support. Support may include help in getting established, or funding for events or development opportunities for those who step up as CoP leaders.The criteria for support include the number of members, a commitment to CoP autonomy, a senior leader sponsor, a charter developed by CoP members, an annual plan and a means of promoting the CoP to potential members, including new staff.A colleague and I have been working with current and budding CoPs to align them to our framework. As illustrated by the examples that opened this article, the groups are many and varied. Some concrete benefits so far can be illustrated using the community for technical staff (TechCop) as an example.TechCoP started last year to unite lab and workshop technical staff across our seven faculties. The vice-chancellor and the executive deans of science and engineering sponsor this group.&nbsp;Of 150-plus potential members, we have so far engaged with about 100 members via:events, including professional development, and opportunities to talk with senior leaderslab/workshop toursa Teams site including a popular “marketplace” channel, which allows members to seek or donate pieces of kit or materials.Benefits to existing and nascent communitiesA survey of members provided encouraging feedback such as:&nbsp;“Really appreciate the connection and sense of community.”“Meeting face to face via events and tours has helped get to know others and create a sense of belonging.”“Have really loved meeting new faces and feeling a better inclusion and community across campus. We’ve already been able to help each other as a result.”“I find the tours very helpful to help me understand what resources we have available in different departments."’Marketplace’" is great to allow sharing of equipment.CoPs create a space for purposeful cross-organisational interaction with a shared context. This goes beyond the well-known benefits of sharing knowledge and good practice to significant opportunities for building belonging, group problem-solving, innovation, leadership development and peer support that might not otherwise be realised.&nbsp;A formalised and supportive framework that includes senior leadership sponsorship provides a robust foundation to build from.Karen Mather is director of academy affiliation and organisational development in the People and Culture unit at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Supporting communities of practice across an organisation can provide extraordinary benefits. Drawn from the author’s experience, these tips aim to build connection and engagement through a formalised framework and senior leader sponsorship

A framework to develop communities of practice

Researchers in the Device Foundry, one of three facilities comprising the Centre for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies&nbsp;(CRAFT), an ISI at the University of Toronto (Image credit: Dahlia Katz)It makes sense from an efficiency standpoint for universities to decentralise decision making, allowing faculties to manage their own operations. But this devolved organisational structure can present roadblocks for interdisciplinary innovation, leaving universities in need of a strategy to bring researchers together.&nbsp;At the University of Toronto, the Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISIs) office provides this mechanism, and offers a practical example of how large universities can foster an environment in which interdisciplinary science thrives, allowing researchers to solve global grand challenges.&nbsp;Timothy Chan, the University of Toronto’s associate vice-president&nbsp;and vice-provost of strategic initiatives, says the university pools funding and academic talent from its various divisions and applies them to interdisciplinary projects.“The goal is not just to fund initiatives internally, because we can’t do that forever. But it’s to build a track record and set them up for external success,” he says. “We help build up the initiative, and then when the opportunity arises – whether it is a government grant, an industry partnership, a philanthropic opportunity – we are ready to capitalise because we have already got the structures, the teams and supports in place.”The ISIs cover a broad range of research topics, including climate change, transport and infrastructure, robotics and AI, and cutting-edge healthcare. The University of Toronto’s diverse research portfolio is crucial, allowing the university to roll the dice on high-risk projects without fear of failure.&nbsp;“We need to invest in these kinds of high-risk, high-reward initiatives because if we don’t, it will be harder to compete on the international stage for big opportunities,” Chan says. “We have very steady and stable research programmes that are advancing discoveries, which is great, and that remains a priority for support. But it has become clear that it is also crucial to develop a portfolio into which we make targeted investments, and for us, that’s the ISIs.”&nbsp;Partnerships with outside agencies, be they peer institutions, industry or governmental organisations such as the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, with which the University of Toronto has signed an extension to its five-year deal, can play a key role. The university’s partnership with the NRC has deepened over the years. One of the University of Toronto’s research projects is developing small-scale bio-medical fluidic devices that could be used to diagnose diseases without having to send a blood sample back to a laboratory. With a hospital partner now involved, researchers can trial innovations in a clinical setting.New partnerships can be brokered by building on the success of the ISIs, which help tell the story of research excellence at the University of Toronto. “The ISIs are an excellent way to bring together all of these diverse research stories into a very cohesive narrative,” Chan says.&nbsp;The message is clear: the University of Toronto is open for interdisciplinary collaboration and it has the resources to make it happen.&nbsp;Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.Find out more&nbsp;about Schmidt Science Fellows.Find out more about the University of Toronto’s ISIs.

The University of Toronto’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives offer a compelling case study in what large, complex institutions can do to break down disciplinary silos and drive innovation

Targeted strategies for interdisciplinary innovation

Digital technologies have significantly transformed the world of dentistry and dental workflow over the past decade. But it is not only dental education that has needed to adapt; it is also healthcare design and engineering.&nbsp;At the Faculty of Dentistry of Semmelweis University in Budapest, we&nbsp;recognised the need for interdisciplinary collaboration early on. That is why, in 2022, in cooperation with the John von Neumann University of Kecskemét, we launched a digital dental design bachelor’s degree.&nbsp;Benefits and challenges of collaborating across disciplinesThroughout the training, engineering and medical skills are built on each other to create a body of knowledge that can be used in the highly specialised field of digital dentistry. This close cooperation has also required a significant degree of synchronisation between the universities in the areas of student records and administration.How to train world-champion cardiologistsSteps to adapt engineering education to changing skills demandsTeaching within virtual reality worlds: what, why and whenIt was necessary to put in place a cooperation agreement between the two universities. This clarified that the aggregate data of the subjects taught by the two universities would be managed by Semmelweis University for each student, established a common final examination system and synchronised the diploma thesis procedure.The course takes six semesters. Students complete 180 credits of course units. Part-time training has been deemed the most effective for this type of course. This means one week of face-to-face classes per month during the&nbsp;semesters for our students. Of this, 66 per cent is courses in medicine and healthcare taught by Semmelweis University and 34 per cent is undergraduate courses in basic engineering taught by John von Neumann University.&nbsp;In addition, students can decide at enrolment whether they wish to attend a dental technician course at Bókay School of Semmelweis University for the remaining three weeks of the month. If a student takes advantage of this opportunity, they can earn a degree as a dental technician and a digital dental designer at the same time. For our students who are not enrolled in the dental technician programme, the part-time nature of the training provides an opportunity to work alongside their university studies.Part-time training focused on practiceThe part-time training itself was a big challenge for the university’s lecturers because the Faculty of Dentistry had not had this type of delivery before. This field requires a strong focus on practical training, so we use a variety of online training platforms to motivate our students to continue their preparation and learning even during the weeks of distance learning. Contact hours are largely conducted in our demonstration labs and digital labs. We try to give our students the opportunity to learn how to use as much digital dental design software as possible, as well as to learn about manufacturing through additive and subtractive processes.&nbsp;Building and installing the necessary infrastructure was our first task when we started the course. Since then, the computer workstations, intraoral scanners, CAD software, milling units and 3D printers have not only helped to train digital dental designers, but have also become tools for undergraduate and postgraduate dental students as well as for several continuing education courses.&nbsp;During the weeks of distance learning, our students complete a variety of tasks. They are required to write classic essays on the main topics of each subject, and they have to complete CAD and 3D modelling software assignments. From the fifth semester onwards, training digital dental designers can improve the quality of care provided to patients treated by dental students. Intraoral scanners will be used to make the corresponding impressions of the teeth that dental students prepare in their practices. These are then used by digital dental design students to design bridges and crowns for temporary restorations. The designs are approved by our instructors and can be fabricated by the next practice, most often using additive technology. We expect these assignments and online communication to prepare our students for future work at home or remotely.Complementary skills and a joint degreeAs a result of the cooperation between the two universities, students who successfully complete the requirements will receive a diploma jointly awarded by Semmelweis and John von Neumann universities at the end of their studies.Digital dental designers will be able to support dental teams across the whole spectrum of dentistry, whether for prosthodontics, orthodontics oral surgery or periodontics.&nbsp;They will be able to assist in the digitalisation of dental practices and dental laboratories, and their knowledge will contribute to the efficient operation and innovation of digital technologies and tools in all areas of dentistry.Péter Hermann is vice-rector of education, head of the department of prosthodontics, and founder and head of the digital dental designer bachelor’s degree&nbsp;programme, and Szandra Körmendi is a senior lecturer in the department of prosthodontics and deputy head of the digital dental designer bachelor’s degree&nbsp;programme; both are at Semmelweis University, Budapest.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.

A degree course that blends engineering and dentistry prepares students for their future practice. Here, Szandra Kormendi and Peter Hermann explain how it works

An inter-university and interdisciplinary approach to dental education

Project-based learning encourages students to combine knowledge from different subjects to solve complex, real-world problems. However, it brings challenges such as ensuring fair and transparent project assignments and maintaining smooth communication between students and teachers. This article explores strategies to overcome these and to promote students’ independence.1. Ensuring equitable and transparent project allocationOne of the primary challenges of project-based learning is ensuring that projects are distributed fairly among students while taking their diverse backgrounds, interests and skill sets into consideration. A possible solution could be to use technology to enhance the transparency and efficiency of project allocation.We have outsourced a specialised open-source Moodle plugin called “Fair Allocation”&nbsp;to optimise project allocation at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. It promotes transparency by allowing students to explore project details and prerequisites online in their own time. It also facilitates a more self-directed approach to students’ learning journeys by allowing them to browse through projects based on their strengths and interests.Implementing the Moodle-based automatic allocation system makes project distribution fairer. It allows students to make up to 10 ranked choices based on their preferences. Its algorithm then matches&nbsp;students with projects based on their chosen priorities and each project’s quota (the number of students each project can take), promoting equitability and fostering a diverse and interdisciplinary learning environment.2. Enhancing student autonomy and interdisciplinary learningEngaging students in autonomous, interdisciplinary learning is not easy, especially if they lack a clear understanding of the educational value of such an approach.A potential solution could be to implement student-centred pedagogical methods and foster a culture of autonomy via the following:Personalised learning paths:&nbsp;designing projects that are tailored to students’ interests and career aspirations can significantly enhance their engagement. By offering a wide range of projects that span multiple disciplines, educators empower students to chart their unique learning journeys.Real-time feedback:&nbsp;providing timely and constructive feedback is paramount when cultivating student autonomy. Our&nbsp;study&nbsp;shows that using digital platforms to provide real-time feedback and promote discussion helps students stay on track, grasp project requirements more effectively and make appropriate adjustments on time.Encouraging risk-taking:&nbsp;encouraging students to venture beyond their comfort zones and explore unfamiliar disciplines boosts creativity and innovation. Educators can design projects that bridge the gaps between different disciplines, challenging students to integrate diverse perspectives and develop novel solutions. This approach not only enhances interdisciplinary learning but promotes out-of-the-box thinking.Resource collection: Unpacking academic interdisciplinarityInterdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it workFostering interdisciplinary learning in large-scale doctoral programmes3. Promoting effective communication between students and educatorsIt is important to ensure that communication between students and educators is unhindered by miscommunication, unclear expectations or a lack of feedback mechanisms. To do so, you can adopt a multifaceted communication strategy that leverages technology. Strategies include:Using relevant digital platforms:&nbsp;our&nbsp;study&nbsp;shows that setting up a digital platform specifically for project-related discussions, announcements and feedback can significantly improve communication. Platforms such as Moodle or Microsoft Teams offer many features, including discussion forums, file-sharing capabilities and real-time collaboration tools. These facilitate streamlined and effective communication among students and educators.Scheduling regular check-ins:&nbsp;scheduling check-ins between students and educators maintains communication channels. These check-ins can take various forms, such as virtual meetings, progress reports or casual conversations to resolve queries and concerns promptly and promote a culture of openness and accountability.Setting clear expectations and guidelines:&nbsp;establishing unambiguous guidelines and expectations at the project’s inception helps prevent misunderstandings and ensures all involved are aligned. Disseminating detailed project briefs, timelines and assessment rubrics helps with managing expectations and cultivates transparency and clarity that aids collaboration and the learning process.As we navigate higher education’s evolving landscape, we must adapt our approaches to learning, ensuring that students are prepared to tackle the complex challenges of an interconnected world. By harnessing technology and implementing student-centred pedagogies, educators can effectively address the challenges inherent in interdisciplinary project-based learning. These strategies can help create a robust framework that empowers students to develop interdisciplinary skill sets.&nbsp;Na Li is associate professor, director of the Digital Education Programme, and co-director of the Research Centre for AI and Education and the Academy of Future Education; Eng Gee Lim is dean of the School of Advanced Technology; and Mark Leach is deputy dean of the School of Advanced Technology,&nbsp;all at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

How to overcome challenges in project-based learning

Overcome project-based learning challenges with strategies aimed at empowering students to develop interdisciplinary skill sets

Practical strategies for overcoming challenges in interdisciplinary project-based learning

Policymakers increasingly recognise that no single area of expertise is enough to address the world’s most complex crises. More innovative approaches are needed in tackling challenges ranging from climate change and pandemics to the threat of artificial intelligence – approaches that take in the arts and humanities as well as science and technology.How to create an overnight scientific success (in 20 years)Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: investing in early career interdisciplinarityThe arts and humanities have not been forgotten: finding funding post-pandemicEnter interdisciplinarity, or research drawing on two or more disciplines. It’s a term sometimes opportunistically applied to any project involving multiple subjects, but what it requires is the actual integration of knowledge from these fields – not just a few researchers working independently around a common interest.Academic collaboration is rarely simple, and moving beyond disciplinary boundaries can throw up even more quandaries. How might political scientists work effectively with artists, say, or epidemiologists with historians? Will differences in training and methodology always be surmountable? Should one discipline take the lead over another?Then there are the obstacles that come with transdisciplinarity, which incorporates both academic and societal partners. Working with civic organisations can involve having to negotiate very different expectations and communication styles, or even simply different levels of availability.One of the most common dilemmas is how to go about preparing such research proposals.Team members will understand what their own disciplines can contribute to the project, but how to make the case for a truly collaborative approach?That’s one of the questions addressed by a major European Union-funded project championing interdisciplinarity.&nbsp;SHAPE-ID provides tailored guidance for stakeholders interested in pursuing such partnerships, with a range of multimedia resources designed to guide you through the process. The following guidance comes from the&nbsp;project’s new online toolkit.Ten tips for preparing interdisciplinary research proposals:Remember that your proposal will be read by a range of people, not just those within your research area: don’t assume knowledge of your discipline – describe (concisely) why your research is important, innovative and impactful.&nbsp;Don’t just describe your proposal as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. Explain why an inter- or transdisciplinary approach is necessary to achieve the intended research outcomes.&nbsp;Inter- and transdisciplinary proposals may be evaluated by those with expertise in collaborative research rather than your discipline. Write clearly for a general reader – use the minimum of technical language and abbreviations and define specialist terms when they are first used.&nbsp;Collaboration and integration take many forms and work to achieve. Outline what kind(s) of collaboration or integration you envisage (theoretical, methodological, etc) and the specific ways in which you hope to achieve this.&nbsp;&nbsp;Explain the methods that you plan to use and, if they are novel, give examples where they have been successfully used in other fields.&nbsp;&nbsp;Bear in mind the extra costs associated with inter- or transdisciplinary research, such as additional network building, and budget for them accordingly.&nbsp;&nbsp;If the research involves new collaborations, assume that these relationships will take time to develop and provide opportunities, both formal and informal, for this to happen, especially at the start of the project.&nbsp;&nbsp;If the research includes different types of stakeholders, describe what they bring to the research, what and when they are expected to contribute, and how they will benefit from taking part.&nbsp;&nbsp;Plan for a range of outputs to be produced across the lifetime of the project – this protects against failure and satisfies the needs of different collaborators. Academic publications are usually of little importance to societal partners who will often need more focused outputs – a programme of activities or a new tool to pilot – to justify their continued involvement in the project.&nbsp;&nbsp;Criteria for authorship vary considerably across disciplines. Describe how authorships for project outputs will be allocated – or a process for agreeing on this early in the project – otherwise this can become a major problem.Reflective questions to ask when planning an interdisciplinary research collaboration:Does everyone know who all the partners are and what they will bring to the project? Have all partners been able to contribute to the design of this project? Do the research questions frame the topic in ways that are engaging and fruitful for all partners? Has a shared understanding of the project’s aims and purpose been explicitly stated and agreed upon?&nbsp;&nbsp;Is the research design predefined in the project proposal or to be negotiated among the group? Will there be opportunities for partners to learn about each other’s research methods and perspectives on the topic? How will you avoid making assumptions about partners’ approaches to the topic?&nbsp;&nbsp;How will you ensure that no one group or perspective dominates the research process? Are there mechanisms in place to enable the ongoing exchange of ideas and opinions across disciplines and sectors? Will there be regular meetings that all project partners are expected to attend? Will all partners have the opportunity to provide feedback on project development and outputs? What happens if they cannot reach consensus?It can be a tricky process, but the potential rewards of such collaborations are great. Getting these first steps right is crucial in paving the way to a successful outcome.Catherine Healy recently completed an Irish Research Council-funded PhD at the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin.&nbsp;Catherine Lyall and Isabel Fletcher of the University of Edinburgh are partners of SHAPE-ID, a project that brings together scholars from across Europe to examine interdisciplinary practices.If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered directly to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the&nbsp;THE Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Advice on drafting successful research proposals to secure support and funding for interdisciplinary projects, from three academics with experience developing research partnerships and collaborations

All together now: how to write an interdisciplinary research proposal

Interdisciplinary research is growing in popularity and is increasingly seen as essential. Multiple perspectives on research challenges will often lead to better outcomes. For example, in the BBC’s recent Reith Lectures on&nbsp;AI, it was proposed that “every AI centre that’s working ought to have a resident philosopher or ethicist on board to prick the consciences or at least remind people that this is important”.A common obvious challenge of interdisciplinary research, though, is that one is not just stepping outside boundaries in terms of creating new knowledge but that one is creating (or at least amalgamating) research methodologies. This stepping out of our “comfort methodology zone” creates stresses and can cause risks for staff careers and department reputation.Eight ways your university can make research culture more openEnhance your research through public engagement and collaborationEqual research partnerships are a myth – but we can change that&nbsp;Additionally, differing values and language create barriers to successful collaboration and group cohesion generally. Given the above, how can we successfully establish and run interdisciplinary research teams?A research culture of openness and fluidityCulture is vital. It is important that the prevailing culture is open and egalitarian, empowering researchers to cross research areas, methodologies or communities without fear of failure. Ways in which one can create this is to remove as much unnecessary structure and formal process as possible.Leadership should adopt an anti-structure, anti-committee approach allowing connections and groupings to be generated bottom up by researchers who find common interest. This means minimising the extent to which organisational roles are considered and to reduce or eliminate hierarchical line management structures.Task-oriented teams are the main structure that should be adopted – bringing together individuals who can contribute to a research artefact no matter if they are academics, PhD students, lab technicians, software developers or professional service staff.Within a team, all members should be willing to work on all tasks as time and ability permit. This “team not&nbsp;role” standpoint should permeate all areas. My lab even has a fridge-cleaning rota that all staff are expected to participate in (when we are not in a pandemic).Another important aspect of the culture is to foster individual freedom. Researchers should be free to pursue any research field that they deem interesting through any means. Resources should be accessible with few barriers. We have found that nothing reduces efficiency and motivation more than having to go through internal bidding processes, especially when the available funds are small. Within my lab, our view is, whenever feasible, to simply say “yes” to every request we receive.Hand in hand with this approach are the following constraints and responsibilities:Staff numbers: The attributes of agility and minimal structure and processes constrain the size of the research unit. From our experience, we estimate that 80&nbsp;personnel total – all staff and PhD students – is about the limit. Beyond that, there is a loss of personal connectivity whereby culture and trust are harder to maintain.Setting research targets: The main objective for research staff is to “make an impact” either on academia or society in general. One needs, though, to be careful about how objectives are measured. We use what we term the “Sistine Chapel” KPI: periodically, significant impact should be generated. Micro-measurements can harm a culture as staff start to view their relationship with the research unit as transactional and one that should be gamed.A shared mission: A unifying totem is the last element of culture that we believe is important to success. All staff need to agree at some level on a common epistemological standpoint. For example, we take the Open University’s core mission around equity and openness and add technological innovation. All our research is thus broadly aimed at providing societal good through technology, and we expect and encourage our staff to be ultra-early technology adopters.Hiring and retaining research talentSuccessful researchers tend to be highly motivated and highly skilled. Within a multidisciplinary context, it is important that all staff also have an open attitude and are thus able to engage with new research frameworks and discipline value systems and semantics.Seeking candidates who strongly align with the general unit values and totems is crucial. Over the years we have developed a hiring strategy that places an emphasis on the best places to advertise, which networks to use and how to best highlight what we offer.Talent retention is a topic that is constantly explored and discussed by senior staff in my lab. Interdisciplinary researchers will often be highly sought after and, in some sectors, will be able to command far higher salaries in industry.In addition to the cultural elements outlined above, our strategy for retaining staff is based on:Taking career development seriously: Often overlooked in busy research environments, by senior and junior staff, it is important that all staff have clear career paths and that these are supported. Support will include:intensive mentoring on areas that need development, for example, funding acquisitionunderstanding barriers at the level of the individual (eg, lacking a skill), unit (eg, biased judgements) and organisation (eg, challenging HR policies)ensuring that all academic staff have an “academic home” that they can grow into as their stature increases.&nbsp;Understanding and proactively fighting for all staff needs: A key duty for all line managers and especially the head of the research team is to listen to staff and engage with all other areas to create the best possible work environment. Typical areas that we have discussed lately have covered: visas, working through a pandemic with ill dependants who live outside the UK and supporting staff who wish to engage with the wider community.We are lucky that the Open University is a serious listener. Any serious concern we raise is either resolved quickly or leads to engagement with the institution’s executive. This has enabled us to create an interdisciplinary research environment that is highly regarded externally and where staff in all roles have overwhelmingly reported positive feelings about the work environment. I&nbsp;can personally say that this combination is richly rewarding.John Domingue is director of the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University.If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered directly to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the&nbsp;THE Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

John Domingue explains how to foster a culture of openness and support that encourages and helps staff teams to pursue interdisciplinary research projects

How to successfully develop and run interdisciplinary research teams

A survey of Northwestern University’s latest research projects highlights the institution’s commitment to interdisciplinary science and reveals how vital these cross-disciplinary approaches are for transforming our world. These successes often involve innovative investigations from its medical and engineering faculty, with projects bridging the university’s Chicago and suburban Evanston campuses.&nbsp;For example, one&nbsp;research project uses sensors to improve treatment paths for patients with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disorder. The full story of how Northwestern became a top-ranked research institution has deep roots.Eric Perreault, vice-president for research at Northwestern, suggests the story dates to at least the 1950s when research initiatives led to the university’s biomedical engineering and materials science departments being launched. These efforts established an impact-focused research environment that resisted siloed thinking.“This interdisciplinary research culture is deeply embedded in Northwestern,” Perreault says. We have worked hard to foster interdisciplinary research on campus and continue this tradition. One way we have done it is through our 35&nbsp;university-wide research institutes and centres (URICs), which fuel innovation and translation.”Northwestern’s research culture manifests itself in the scale of its operations and the infrastructure it has developed. More than 700 Northwestern faculty from 100 different departments work within the URICs. One relatively recently established URIC focuses on&nbsp;synthetic biology, bringing together biology, engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science and social sciences under one roof. Northwestern is already considered a leader in this cross-field domain, and its synthetic biology faculty has launched multiple start-up ventures, adding to the university’s&nbsp;entrepreneurial portfolio.&nbsp;“We have this really interdisciplinary approach attempting to drive transformative innovation in various areas, including targeted drug development, sustainable manufacturing and advanced materials. To do that, you need to have a deep understanding of biology, a deep understanding of how to engineer new systems, and a deep understanding of the challenges people are facing,” Perreault says.There are more than 50 core facilities on campus, where researchers can access PhD-level expertise and state-of-the-art equipment for gene sequencing, imaging, or materials characterisation. When Northwestern invested $8 million (£6.4 million) in a cryo-electron microscopy system, it ensured that faculty from myriad disciplines could access it.“Our shared facilities increase access to top-tier instrumentation and provide a common platform that brings faculty from different disciplines together for a common purpose,” Perreault says. “They see each other when designing experiments or collecting data, often spurring new ideas and collaborations.”Third-party partnerships can yield dramatic results,&nbsp;such as Northwestern’s collaboration with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, which developed stickers that monitor a patient’s internal organs via ultrasound, offering an early warning sign for post-operation complications.Northwestern also contributes to and benefits from a first-class regional research ecosystem. With two national laboratories nearby, it can access supercomputers and other resources that no university could afford. At the same time, it contributes to research excellence in numerous fields, from chemistry and materials science to physics, medicine and various engineering domains. It also partners with fellow regional institutions when applying for federal or foundation funding. A three-way project with the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign secured a $250 million (£200 million) grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to fund a&nbsp;pioneering biotech hub, the president of which is a Northwestern faculty member.Research culture and history can only take an institution so far. Ultimately, academic talent sustains innovation, and Northwestern offers a fantastic environment and attractive opportunities to faculty and students alike. After all, Perreault says, recruitment is the bedrock of Northwestern’s success: “One of the things we are doing well is educating the next generation of global talent – students who will bring exceptional and highly interdisciplinary skills to industry and academia.”&nbsp;Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.Find out more&nbsp;about Schmidt Science Fellows.

At Northwestern University, a long history of interdisciplinary collaboration among its world-class faculty generates groundbreaking research

It takes connections to become a research superpower

Research impact is an important indicator of the reputation of academics and their institutions. As director of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) Academy for Interdisciplinary Research (PAIR), a research platform dedicated to impactful interdisciplinary research, here are my thoughts on how universities can develop impactful research and make meaningful, society-changing findings.Making research practical and influentialWhile theoretical research focuses on delving into the origins of the universe and human existence out of pure curiosity, applied research examines practical matters and seeks to generate solutions to real-world problems. It aims to bring direct, positive impact to society, across individuals, industries and communities.Driving change through knowledge: how to increase policy impactIt’s high time we rethought policy impactAdvice for effective cross-team collaboration for researchResearch findings need to be translated into real-world solutions to have extensive practical impact. We need technologies, services and interventions that are accessible for adoption and use by society. This involves collaboration both within and beyond the university.PAIR collaborates closely with other key PolyU units, including the Research and Innovation Office and the Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship Office, for the patenting and licensing of our solutions. We also collaborate with industry and end users so that innovations are designed to be fit for purpose. In this way, proprietary technologies can be adopted by government and industry, and related products powered by these cutting-edge technologies can be made available for purchase in the market.An example of impactful research from a PAIR constituent unit is Liverscan. A palm-sized real-time brightness (B)-mode ultrasound imaging guided system, it was developed for liver fibrosis assessment, marking a major step in promoting a precise, effective and non-invasive method for diagnosing liver diseases in China. To manufacture and market the system, the research team founded Eieling Technology Limited, enabling the use of this patented innovation in a number of hospitals and medical examination centres in Hong Kong and mainland China. It will soon be introduced to the mainland Chinese consumer market. The start-up was listed on Forbes Asia 100 To Watch 2023.The success of Liverscan is just one example of how applied research can achieve extensive impact through different interlocking processes, from research and development, assessment, patenting and licensing to marketing, and through collaborations at local, national and international levels.Identifying research prioritiesA clear, well-defined, appropriate research scope is another prerequisite for impactful research. But tackling complex societal challenges requires interdisciplinary expertise.At PAIR, we have established 18 constituent research units, each comprising PolyU researchers from different schools and departments. Each unit focuses on applied research in a frontier area that falls under three key themes: advanced technologies and manufacturing, good health and well-being, and smart, sustainable cities. Responding to local development needs and the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, they provide innovative, cost-effective solutions that facilitate land, city and infrastructure development, promote physical and mental health, and support high-end, high value-added manufacturing and technologies.As I noted previously, collaboration is key to impactful applied research. It should be embraced at various levels and include: interdisciplinary collaboration within and between research units and between these and other academic units; inter-institutional collaboration between the university and academic/research institutions worldwide; and cross-sectoral collaboration with industry and government.On this, PAIR constituent research units have contributed to the university’s collaboration with industries, businesses, professional associations and government bodies in Hong Kong and worldwide. We have set up joint research projects, institutes, centres and laboratories dedicated to developing new technologies in diverse areas, including sports, advanced manufacturing, land development, human health and many more. &nbsp;Overcoming barriers to interdisciplinary researchCollaboration is crucial in helping overcome obstacles when pursuing large-scale interdisciplinary research. It can help with enhancing cross-disciplinary communication among researchers so that team members with different expertise are aligned towards achieving a common goal. Sharing laboratories and equipment with other academic units can allow physical assets to be used effectively. Collaborating can also engage industries and top institutions worldwide, creating emergent research and funding opportunities.Here are three examples to show how to provide this support:PAIR Researchers’ Corner is a regular activity, bringing together PolyU researchers from across disciplines for research exchange in a casual setting.Institutions can hold regular research salons, allowing for cross-sectional exchange between researchers and industry representatives.Encourage researchers to visit government and enterprise representatives frequently to explore the potential for joint projects and establish potential joint research units in frontier areas.University research can – and should – take many different directions and forms. Achieve the end-goal of research impact through applied, interdisciplinary research that has a clear focus and generates practical, accessible solutions. The success of interdisciplinary research lies in collaboration – both internal collaboration within a university and external collaboration with industry and governments. It should be embraced at all levels within the university.Qingyan Chen is director of PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Maximise your research impact through collaboration

What’s the best way to achieve research impact? Qingyan Chen makes the case for an interdisciplinary approach

Maximise your research impact through interdisciplinary collaboration

What is interdisciplinary?Interdisciplinary education is all the rage, but we don’t all mean the same thing by that phrase. Sometimes, the term ends up being used synonymously with “effective education that prepares students for a complex world”, which is not helpful as it focuses on an outcome rather than the process. There is also an association between interdisciplinarity and the idea of a “broad” or “generalist education” or getting students to learn or be exposed to multiple or contrasting subjects.As with most buzzwords, neither those who praise interdisciplinarity nor those who complain about it can be assumed to be commenting on the same thing.Fostering interdisciplinary learning in large-scale doctoral programmesDesigning postgraduate education as a means of sharing and developing academic and professional knowledgeDeveloping research skills post-pandemic: creating space for reflection and conversationSo, it can be helpful to turn to scholarly definitions. Marilyn Stember of the University of Colorado defined interdisciplinarity as the “integration of the contributions of several disciplines to a problem or issue” where this integration “brings interdependent parts of knowledge into harmonious relationships”.She also contrasts interdisciplinarity with:multidisciplinarity, when several disciplines “each provide a different perspective on a problem or issue”; andtransdisciplinarity, which involves an even higher level of integration, where the disciplinary perspectives themselves fall away, to be replaced by a “unity of intellectual frameworks”.How to put interdisciplinarity into practice when designing coursesHow does all this look operationally within a single course? Probably the simplest way to introduce interdisciplinarity is to make sure that we consciously build courses around identifiable complex issues and topics, rather than disciplines.Let’s take a standard intermediate economics course as an example – something like “Introduction to macroeconomics”. This will typically focus on teaching students a set of economic models and tools to analyse data and make predictions. In the same way, a course from psychology, maybe “developmental psychology”, will help students become familiar with the dominant theories in this subdiscipline. &nbsp;These lessons are much-needed milestones in the training of economists and psychologists. But what if we were to take our eyes off training someone as a disciplinary expert, and focus on offering them access to interdisciplinarity? It would seem more expedient to begin from the other direction – from issues and aspects in the world.We might be thinking of the impact of ageing on the human mind, or the domestication of rice, or climate change mitigation, or managing the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. These are issues and topics that, by virtue of their natural complexity, require integration of insights and tools from a variety of disciplines – perhaps economics, and psychology, and physics, and chemistry, to name a few – in order to build understanding or find resolutions to these multifaceted problems.Nonetheless, most university professors have PhDs in specific disciplines and are rewarded and promoted for producing highly specialised contributions (ie, “impactful” research that gains the approval of their equally specialised peers). Inevitably, this means instructors who can embody that integration of insights and tools don’t grow on trees and these skills need to be developed.Teaching in interdisciplinary teamsOne way to overcome this hurdle is to teach in teams. But if the team is merely multidisciplinary – colleagues from different disciplines each providing distinct perspectives on a problem or issue – we haven’t quite achieved that desired integration either.The teams need to be true collaborations with a unity of purpose defined by the topic at hand. This requires professors who, while specialists in their own fields, are broad-minded in the way they approach the issues they care about and are not fastidious about disciplinary purity.We are looking for colleagues whose involvement in such a course isn’t just so that they can “teach their share of physics, philosophy or computing” as part of a line-up of several topics, but instead to work together as a team, united by the joint aim of illuminating the shared topic for the benefit of the students. We need more academics able and willing to take this approach.Interdisciplinarity in university programmesSo far, so good for the individual course. But what about at the programme level?One plea I should make is that we do not mistakenly think that just because something is good, it must be implemented everywhere.For students to profit from a topic-based interdisciplinary course, they will still need a good grounding in transferable foundational competencies, such as quantitative thinking, critical thinking, constructing written arguments, computational reasoning and empirical inquiry.Otherwise, those topic-based interdisciplinary courses end up pitched too low. What this means is that an interdisciplinary education at the programme level should comprise courses laying foundations in transferable competencies alongside explicitly topic-based interdisciplinary courses.Ironically, what this means is that administrators and designers of a programme may well need to resist a temptation to make all parts of their charge maximally interdisciplinary. Different parts of a programme are needed to serve different roles.Some parts will be highly interdisciplinary while others will be preparatory and only interdisciplinary within a narrow range. And yet others may be geared towards producing the highly knowledgeable specialists of narrowly focused fields, who we still need in a complex modern society.Bear in mind, the formal curriculum can only do so much. Beyond that, there are also important lessons to be gleaned from out-of-classroom experiential learning, projects, residential communities, global opportunities. All have their own parts to play in contributing to a modern interdisciplinary progamme.If we do our jobs as educators and programme designers well, even the specialists should be ready and willing to work together with those from other specialisms, to help understand complex issues or to solve the problems facing humanity.Loy Hui Chieh is an associate professor and vice-dean of external relations and student life in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at National University of Singapore.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered directly to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Loy Hui Chieh explains what true interdisciplinarity is and how to successfully embed it into university courses 

Interdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it work

Pressing global challenges spark the need for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and convergence research. These terms are often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences between them.Multidisciplinary research involves faculty from different disciplines working independently on a common research problem or a thematic area to supplement each other’s data. Interdisciplinary research involves working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries to develop integrated knowledge that meets a specific challenge. Such collaboration has led to the emergence of novel areas such as photonics, nanoscience and technology, material sciences and neurosciences. &nbsp;The emerging convergence research area facilitates the transdisciplinary merging of life sciences, physical sciences, engineering and beyond to stimulate innovation from basic science discovery to translational research. Such merging requires a deep integration of collaborating disciplines and its results should have a positive societal impact. This resource outlines the advantages and challenges of working beyond the comfort zones of discipline-specific research.AdvantagesActive knowledge exchange (creation): this kind of collaboration facilitates active collaboration and concept sharing between parties across different disciplines. Such interactions lead to specific knowledge exchange, skills development, fresh insight and solution-driven pathways that are only achievable when working across disciplines. For example, many of the healthcare devices that we routinely employ are the outcome of efficient collaboration and knowledge exchange between clinicians, engineers and scientists. &nbsp;Well-rounded solutions to complex global challenges: addressing real-world global challenges such as climate change, energy crises, agriculture demand and water scarcity requires expertise across different domains including physics, chemistry, economics, politics and others. Therefore, breaking the silos of disciplines via interdisciplinary and convergence research is vital if we want to facilitate innovative and well-rounded solutions. &nbsp;The creation of new scientific fields: interdisciplinary or convergence research can result in in-depth interaction between scholars across disciplines. This can lead to the development of completely new fields of enquiry that explore uncharted territory.Creativity and skills development: the blending of varied expertise through such research projects often leads to productive and high-impact experimentation, analysis and out-of-the-box thinking, as we saw with the production of Covid vaccines. In addition, cross-disciplinary research subjects such as photonics, nanoscience and technology and structural biology provide researchers with opportunities to work on research ventures beyond their existing skill sets and knowledge. This opens the mind and enhances communication skills. Arguably the most exciting outcomes of such collaboration, however, include improved problem-solving skills, research outcomes, understanding of complex phenomena and high-calibre innovations.Resources for higher education professionals on interdisciplinarityBreaking down disciplinary silos in pursuit of innovationPractical strategies for overcoming challenges in interdisciplinary project-based learningChallengesDisciplinary boundaries and jargon: researchers from different disciplines use their specialised language and theories which can create obstacles to communication. The key to overcoming such boundaries is to be inclusive with language by using simple, everyday terminology that collaborators from different fields can understand.Communication issues: finding common ground among people with different ways of thinking and approaches to problem-solving is often challenging. This kind of collaboration can lead to communication difficulties and disagreement that can hinder research progress. Knowing your audience, organising the information effectively and focusing on the output can facilitate seamless communication. Be culturally sensitive and use open channels of communication with efficient feedback loops.Knowledge imbalance: team members must have a general understanding of each other’s disciplines to collaborate effectively. To conduct rigorous research, a balance of general knowledge and disciplinary expertise is important, but finding team members with this can be a formidable task.Resource management: interdisciplinary and convergence research projects often require infrastructure and resources from various institutions and funding agencies which is often difficult to obtain and manage. Although the emergence of interdisciplinary research centres and departments in universities and institutes promises a positive change, people and resource management pose challenges. The time researchers have to invest in familiarising themselves with new peers from diverse backgrounds can delay research progress.It is heartening to see that the governments of many countries putting efforts into skills development for multi-, interdisciplinary and convergence research in higher education. Despite their challenges, the perks that they offer far outweigh them.Sajan Daniel George is a professor and the head of the department for atomic and molecular physics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Interdisciplinary vs multidisciplinary and convergence resea

Global challenges demand collaboration across disciplines. This resource explores the associated advantages and challenges

Interdisciplinary vs multidisciplinary and convergence research

Building the foundations for a sustained human presence on the Moon requires the support of scientists, engineers, policymakers and researchers from across the globe. Intentionally forming research communities, in which scientists and engineers of diverse abilities and disciplinary backgrounds have a forum to collaborate across shared goals, is crucial.A future lunar outpost requires the translation of both existing technologies and the development of new technologies for the lunar and cislunar space. Such technologies can be used to automate construction, improve communication and navigation across the lunar surface, and to sustainably harness power in the harsh lunar environment. Developing a lunar outpost demands a huge effort from our tenacious terrestrial science and research communities.&nbsp;“We are in this place right now with space exploration where we are trying to bring in way more people and way more non-traditional partners than we have ever had,” says Wesley Fuhrman, a senior scientist in the Space Exploration Sector at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.&nbsp;Fuhrman is a leader for Nasa’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Lunar Operating Guidelines for Infrastructure Consortium. These research communities comprise academic, industry and government stakeholders engaging in an open dialogue.&nbsp;“We are developing the technologies and recommending interoperating standards for a sustained presence and commercial economy on the Moon, so not just to drop the lander down for a couple of days and come back up,” Fuhrman says. “That is a huge process in going from footprint to foothold. The only way you can get to that point is to leverage the phenomenal technology base that has developed since then.”Fuhrman’s experience as a Schmidt Science Fellow gave him some ideas of how research communities bolster interdisciplinary research. “Strong and defined values and ethics build communities, and openly discussing them helps establish a culture that forms the bedrock,” Furman says. “I prefer to be explicit when we talk. What are we trying to accomplish when we are having our sessions? How do we want to support each other? We learned a lot of that through the Schmidt Science programme. We were very much encouraged from the get-go, with dedicated time and attention paid to creating a culture.”“Allowing the community to both organically and intentionally be built around its shared ethics and develop the people within it, is what yields results,” Fuhrman says. “Keep the focus on the community and shared vision, not just the output. If you do that, you’ll end up getting much better output anyway.”Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.Find out more&nbsp;about Schmidt Science Fellows.

Large-scale projects, such as creating a sustained presence on the Moon, are complex, interdisciplinary endeavours that test researchers to the limit. But with support from the research community – united by common purpose and values – lunar development efforts can take a giant leap towards establishing an outpost on the Moon

Shooting for the Moon with interdisciplinary approaches to lunar development

Image credit: Josh Fee

Interdisciplinary science thrives when researchers are given the time, space and freedom to pursue their intellectual curiosity in environments where no question is considered off-limits. Those conditions are not always easy to find on campus, where incentive structures encourage specialisation, often leaving the big ideas on ice. 

Rachel Parker, senior director of research and head of next-generation initiatives at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), says this has to change. She believes that organisations like CIFAR can play a vital role in supporting scientists by putting them in a room together and developing their most ambitious ideas – those that might have been too radical,&nbsp;or simply too interdisciplinary, to be entertained elsewhere.

“We want people to come with their earliest possible idea, something that is truly formative and is going to benefit from the collective knowledge around the table,” Parker says. “All CIFAR programmes are orientated around the next big idea, the next challenge, ones that are so complex that they necessitate a really broad constellation of people, an interdisciplinary perspective, in order to make progress on fundamental research.”

CIFAR facilitates interdisciplinary science through a number of initiatives. Its research programmes might involve a collaboration between up to 25 fellows, and operate on renewable five-year terms with no sunset clause in recognition that this is work that requires long-term commitment. “It takes a long time for these highly interdisciplinary groups to build a shared language, a shared sense of direction and trust across the group,” says Parker. CIFAR offers a space for ideas that might not fit the traditional disciplinary mould in other academic contexts. Its meetings are hosted under the Chatham House Rule, encouraging open discussion.

CIFAR supports early-career researchers through its Azrieli Global Scholars Programme, which grants junior faculty C$100,000 (£58,000) over two years, in addition to the opportunity to work alongside established researchers. The programme also provides seed funding via Catalyst Grants, which further enable early-career researchers with interdisciplinary projects to take bigger risks. “It has to be an idea that has no obvious home,” Parker says. “We have a couple of examples where those have spun out into half-a-million-dollar grants further down the line. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it enables these researchers to further their impact and their careers. It’s rewarding to know that CIFAR provided the space for that conversation to even happen in the first place.”

In addition to its Azrieli Global Scholars Programme, CIFAR’s Child and Brain Development programme piloted a training scheme offering mentorship to late-career graduate students and postdoctoral students, exposing them to the reality of life as an interdisciplinary scientist, in which there is always something new to learn.

“They get exposure to how their mentors are asking questions when they don’t understand something,” Parker says. “That is also crucial: being willing to show your vulnerabilities, that you have something to learn from another discipline.”

CIFAR partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows&nbsp;in 2023 to bring together a group of CIFAR-Azrieli Global Scholars and Schmidt Science Fellows to explore opportunities&nbsp;for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.

Find out more&nbsp;about Schmidt Science Fellows.

Getting multidisciplinary projects off the ground can be a heavy lift for even the most motivated scientists, but forward-thinking organisations like CIFAR are willing to lend a hand, convening international research groups and offering the much-needed support to develop their ideas

Where the boldest research ideas find a home

Image credit: Claudine Gossett

Discussions of impactful research often focus on the bigger picture: impact at a societal level, how an innovation might revolutionise an industry or improve the lives of a particular community. And yet for researchers like Sandya Subramanian, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, impact is something they can put a name and a face to.

Subramanian’s research focuses on developing a physiological monitoring system that gathers data from the autonomic nervous system in chronic migraine patients. The work is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring computational and hardware expertise, and it finds her deployed in clinical settings, where patients will often consider her a part of their clinical team. 

“People will share aspects of their life with you and be very open and vulnerable with you in ways that sometimes is very intimidating to handle,” she says. “But one of the benefits of being interdisciplinary all this time is that I have been trained, I have a familiarity with clinical environments that really helps that.”

Being embedded as a “pseudo member” of the clinical team, collecting this data herself and interacting with patients, Subramanian enjoys a unique perspective on her research and considers her patients co-collaborators whose feedback on the monitoring technology is invaluable.

“It gives you this very human perspective,” she says. “You get this very real kind of sampling like when people come back and tell you, ‘Well, this was a little hard to wear. This was a little uncomfortable’. It gives you a very real sampling of the real-world problems of implementing this. As a scientist, it also gives you a whole new perspective on the data.”

The American Migraine Foundation estimates that up to 148 million people worldwide have chronic migraines, with three to five per cent of the US population affected. Subramanian hopes the data pooled from the autonomic nervous system – which she describes as a bridge between brain and body – can be used to inform better treatment pathways.

“The autonomic nervous system is probably the less-loved child because everyone focuses on what happens in the brain directly and the spinal cord next, and then everyone is interested in things like movement and decision-making and emotion,” she says. “They are all so much more sexier sounding than basic reflexes, right? The autonomic nervous system gets a lot less attention and therefore has been far less studied.”

It might be less-studied but it’s no less important. The data collected by this technology could offer insights into any number of conditions. More broadly, the application of wearable physiological sensors could change the existing healthcare paradigm, with data insights gleaned from wearable tech facilitating more personalised medicine. If successful, Subramanian’s patients will have played their part.

“Most patients are happy to participate because they see it as their way of giving back to the healthcare system,” she says. “They are asking lots of questions and are really happy to take on some inconvenience and participate and for that I have always been very grateful.”

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.

Find out more&nbsp;about Schmidt Science Fellows.

At the frontiers of computational research and medical hardware, interdisciplinary approaches offer hope to chronic migraine patients through ground-breaking physiological sensors and analytical tools that analyse the autonomic nervous system for clues about the debilitating condition

Inside the data-driven search for migraine relief

Society’s digital transformation is still in its infancy and yet we already have an ocean of data to draw upon. But if all this information is to provide us with the raw material for innovation, we need scientists who can interpret it. Sahil Loomba is one such scientist. A Schmidt Science Fellow&nbsp;in the&nbsp;Institute for Data, Systems and Society&nbsp;at&nbsp;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Loomba specialises in applying mathematics and machine learning to better understand complex networks and systems, from the biological and cognitive to the social.

“Networks are my favourite abstraction, and I try to view physical, biological, social, technological, and ecological systems from that perspective. Without that holistic view, we risk being reductionist and unable to plug significant gaps in our knowledge of these complex systems,” Loomba says.

“We are swimming in a lot of data, but to really make sense of that we need to understand the underlying network structure, the mechanisms that are generating that data, to determine what is happening causally,” he says. “For me, it is not just a helpful lens to view the world from, and intellectually stimulating, but it is also a matter of actively solving practical problems.”

Loomba was a computer science and engineering undergraduate when he realised his intellectual curiosity would take him across disciplinary boundaries. He could see how mathematical and computational approaches might help solve problems in biological systems. Loomba’s predoctoral work at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering gave him first-hand experience of an interdisciplinary research environment.

“It exemplifies the idea of interdisciplinary science and engineering because, under one roof, it had engineers, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians and doctors working together to respond to extremely complicated challenges in biology and medicine,” he says. “The kinds of outputs that we had were amazing; taking a networked view of genetic perturbations allowed us to successfully repurpose drugs for rare genetic conditions that have now entered clinical trials. It really drove it home for me that interdisciplinary science is what motivates me. It helps us solve real problems in an integrative manner that traditional disciplinary silos often don’t.”

For his doctoral work at Imperial College London, Loomba pivoted to studying misinformation, vaccination behaviours and social segregation in friendship networks, responding to several societal challenges faced during the Covid-19 pandemic. He became a Schmidt Science Fellow in 2023, and the fellowship has allowed him to negotiate many of the obstacles that interdisciplinary scientists face, not least the pressure to publish. It has allowed him to engage in more academic partnerships and to take on more ambitious projects, with the fellowship removing some of the risks that come with cross-disciplinary work.

“I think one of the most wonderful things about the fellowship is that it is a fellowship; we are in a community of people who care for the same things at the end of the day, which is interdisciplinary science,” Loomba says. “We felt seen and heard in terms of the way we like to approach scientific research. That is a big component. It puts me at a kind of psychological ease as a somewhat iconoclastic researcher who is not going to stick to the norm.”

This scientific iconoclasm underpins Loomba’s sweeping research philosophy, which places computation at the heart of understanding the intricate networks that organise our world, from those on a biomolecular level to the systems governing society. “It would be good to see expanded support for researchers pursuing interdisciplinary sciences at all career stages, recognising the important role this approach can play in addressing the challenges we face,” Loomba concludes.

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.

Find out more about Schmidt Science Fellows.

Our lives are governed by complex connected systems, and Schmidt Science Fellow Sahil Loomba has made it his life’s work to understand them. He is taking an interdisciplinary path, combining computation, statistics and machine-learning approaches to improve the world we live in

Understanding complex systems with computational power and interdisciplinary science

Intellectual curiosity is what animates scientists to do what they do – to dig deeper and ask the big questions. It does not heed disciplinary boundaries, and so, when those big questions take a scientist to the edge of their expertise, they must decide whether to follow their curiosity over it. Moving into new fields to translate biological insights into new robot capabilities is exactly how Ryan Truby, a biomedical engineer by undergraduate training, ended up at Northwestern University as an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. 

A synopsis of Truby’s recent grants reads with the air of science fiction, spanning artificial muscle tissues for locomotion in soft machines to robotic architected materials with distributed sensorimotor capabilities. Truby’s research is centred on bridging the gap between living organisms and their capabilities and the world of robotics. It resides at the interface of materials engineering and robotics.

“We have a wealth of understanding about how the human body – or any living organism – works, how it is built and what materials comprise it,” he says. “We can look at robotics and quickly see that some of these insights might help us advance machine intelligence in new and critical ways. This is the problem space my lifelong curiosities have brought me to, taking those insights from biology and thinking about how I can translate them to advance the capabilities of robots. My hope is that the journey ahead will enable us to materialise true autonomy, true intelligence, in ways that computational approaches alone simply can’t.”

Truby made his pivot to materials science as a PhD student at Harvard University, where he found the intellectual breathing space to explore the construction of bioinspired robots and devices from soft matter. He notes it was a time when he first felt the tension between disciplinary focus and the interdisciplinary nature of his scientific interests.

Truby’s PhD advisor, Jennifer Lewis, helped him through. “Jennifer has become such a role model. Looking back, all my lab mates from those years are still among the most talented people I know. She had a way of bringing us together, with all our different backgrounds, to build a research team that was able to work on a variety of problems at the intersections of many fields,” Truby says. Being offered a Schmidt Science Fellowship, however, was “essential”, offering him similarly inspiring mentorship but on a systemic scale – and with funding. “The Schmidt Science Fellowship completely changed my reality,” he says. “It gave me a sense of agency to run straight into working in robotics as a materials engineer.”

Truby says he would love to see a research ecosystem that funds PhD students and postdoctoral researchers directly – a partial inversion of the current funding landscape that allows researchers at the earliest career stage to more directly take part in the formulation of interdisciplinary research projects aimed at solving major challenges. “The Schmidt Science Fellowship empowered me with the freedom to take a line of interdisciplinary enquiry in my research. I can only imagine the impact others could have and how quickly we could advance interdisciplinary science if they were given that same support and independence,” he says.

Inevitably, it will be Truby’s students who are designing solutions for tomorrow’s world. The current PhD students and postdoctoral scholars in his lab are already investigating how soft robotic materials can be deployed in areas such as sustainability and healthcare settings. It is all interdisciplinary, intellectual curiosity set loose.

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.

Find out more about Schmidt Science Fellows.

The field of soft robotics draws on insights from biology and the abilities of living organisms to advance robot design. It offers a case study of why supporting interdisciplinary research among early career scientists drives innovation and yields radical scientific discoveries

Empowering early-career researchers to take intellectual curiosity to grand challenges

It is not difficult to find advocates for interdisciplinary research among the scientific research community. Most in academia recognise the potential of cross-disciplinary approaches to develop innovative solutions to complex real-world problems, such as climate change and healthcare. And yet barriers to interdisciplinary research remain. 

Stu Feldman, co-CEO and chief scientist at Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt to encourage interdisciplinary science, says barriers persist because of outdated incentive structures for individuals and institutions alike. “Almost nobody will say interdisciplinarity is a bad idea. Just, ‘Not here, or not in my department, or not yet in my career’,” Feldman says. “And we want to say, ‘Yes, it is time.’”

Feldman acknowledges that disciplines have positive aspects. But the world has changed. They traditionally offer structure, quality control and recognition, but disciplinary boundaries can be a straitjacket for researchers who seek funding and support for projects that find them collaborating with like-minded scientists on the frontier of their intellectual curiosity.

“Innovation happens because of new tools and new insights, or the freedom to roam on the intellectual sphere,” Feldman says. “Science is particularly prone to this because we have a more rigid funding and publication structure than some other scholarly fields. Climate is the poster boy example today of something that crosses lines, but the introduction of artificial intelligence into scientific use is about to disrupt the boundaries all over the place because that brings in all kinds of knowledge, all kinds of things that are not native to the classic disciplines. The opportunities are enormous. The needs are enormous.”

But if researchers are not encouraged to cross disciplines, they won’t. In particular, early career researchers face pressures to make an impact in their field to secure funding, to publish regularly, and the career advice they are often given is to pursue interdisciplinary research at a later date. Often that day will not arrive. “It is very hard to break out,” Feldman says. “We are very interested in providing advice, recommendations and top-down help.”

These top-down mechanisms include a partnership between Schmidt Science Fellows and Times Higher Education to develop a new ranking for interdisciplinary research. Feldman hopes that, by celebrating excellence, universities will be motivated to support faculty in crossing disciplines. He is hopeful that change is in the air. 

Newer institutions are embracing interdisciplinarity early in their development, building departments around broader scientific themes, such as life sciences and physical sciences, as opposed to those aligned to narrow disciplines. “They don’t have the weight of 50 years of tenured faculty lined up across each major field,” Feldman says. “We are seeing evidence that some new entrants into major science are very much encouraging line crossing.”

The real world’s problems can be too entangled for one discipline to tackle alone. Research projects often naturally become interdisciplinary when they are steered by impact. “Once you ask, ‘What’s the impact of what you’ve discovered?’ suddenly you are looking at engineering and biology and computer science,” Feldman says. “If you don’t have people who have deep scholarly knowledge – not just random reading – you will not get it right.”

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.

Find out more about Schmidt Science Fellows.

Interdisciplinary approaches allow researchers of different scholarly backgrounds to pool their expertise and enhance the impact of their discoveries. But for these projects to flourish, we need to rethink the research ecosystem to support scientists as they cross disciplinary lines

Breaking down disciplinary silos in pursuit of innovation

Science is facing a new reality in which the world’s most difficult problems can only be solved by interdisciplinary research, and this requires a change in how research is taught and conducted. Shriya Srinivasan, assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, can testify to the scientific advantages of crossdisciplinary collaboration – but also the challenges facing early career scientists. She argues that if we want more interdisciplinary science, we need systemic change.

“In a lot of ways, the education system needs to change,” Srinivasan says. “At a very early stage, there need to be workshops, courses – curricula that promote crossdisciplinary training. The next layer is governmental policy, regulatory and incentive structures, and the development of facilities that enable interdisciplinary individuals to have career paths that are non-linear and non-standard.”

Srinivasan’s research interests lie on the frontiers of medicine and engineering, approaching surgical reconstruction – a sub-field of plastic and reconstructive surgery – from an engineering perspective. She is a product of the health sciences and technology programme co-administered by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While undertaking her PhD, Srinivasan pioneered approaches to restoring touch and feel in prosthetic limbs, and how to translate these groundbreaking procedures into clinical settings. 

“I employ a blend of surgical reconstruction and ingestible or implantable bioelectronics to address dysfunctions in motor and sensory control,” she says. “My work is inherently interdisciplinary because I blend fields of engineering and medicine that hadn’t historically intersected. Nowadays, the biomedical engineering field brings these disciplines together to a great degree; however, this is a relatively nascent approach in many parts of the world .”

Third-party institutions can assist in career development. A Schmidt Science Fellowship gave Srinivasan the confidence and support to expand her work into different areas. The lessons she learned designing and commercializing medical devices for global health markets, through the Project Prana Foundation, Srinivasan’s non-profit, have informed education programmes that the foundation now offers to students. These enable young minds to receive exposure to adjacent fields in their undergraduate and graduate years and inspire them to imagine interdisciplinary solutions. This is a first step towards strengthening healthcare innovation in global health contexts.&nbsp; Today’s interdisciplinary scientist needs a wide skillset.

“Primary among them is communication and the ability to manage and engage with the diversity of communication styles and lexicons present between team members that are from different disciplines,” Srinivasan says. “Each field has its own operating language and jargon. That can lead to gaps in understanding or misunderstandings, and so communication is a key skill.”

Managing knowledge gaps is another skill. It is critical for interdisciplinary scientists to learn as much as they can about adjacent disciplines. Srinivasan holds workshops, brainstorming sessions where different research perspectives can be shared, and weekly meetings in her lab with clinicians, engineers and, on occasion, patients and stakeholders from the policymaking sphere.

“In many situations, there are also hierarchical structures in one field that don’t exist in another,” Srinivasan says. “There are ways in which a field works that make it very difficult to bridge, and so learning to navigate all of these demands a multifaceted skillset.” 

Difficult to bridge but not impossible, and the rewards for leaning into these challenges are considerable. “The fruits of this sort of work I have seen personally,” Srinivasan says. “And that really motivates me to take the plunge, every time.”

Times Higher Education has partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to interdisciplinary science. Find out how to participate.

Find out more about Schmidt Science Fellows.

The next generation of interdisciplinary scientists needs a research ecosystem that gives them the skills they need to work with scientists from other fields, as well as the funding and support to bring their research findings to society

Developing a 21st-century skillset for research’s interdisciplinary future

Early career scientists with ambitions of pursuing interdisciplinary research face many structural barriers. The funding process is complicated when there is a cross-disciplinary dimension. There are pressures to conform, to hew close to their chosen field. Support and mentorship are crucial to help academics transcend disciplinary boundaries.

Sir Keith Burnett, chair emeritus and academic council member at Schmidt Science Fellows (SSF), has considerable experience coaching early-career scientists on making such transitions. Working with the SSF mentorship team, he helps new fellows develop the skills and strategies they will need for an interdisciplinary career.

“We help them investigate where they can best pursue their change of direction and goals,” Sir Keith says. “They work through the options for their new institution and research environment. This a really challenging process in which the fellow makes the decision of where to go while discussing with us the scientific and practical challenges they will face.”

Interdisciplinary science thrives when researchers dare to step out of their comfort zone and follow their intellectual curiosity, whereupon they will inevitably need to develop new skills. SSF offers its fellows a comprehensive training programme to develop their skill sets – not all are scientific. Fellows will need to learn how to lead a team and build networks. Finding like-minded partners, with whom expertise can be pooled and shared, is critical, as is finding an institution that will support these endeavours.

“The key issue is finding a group that sees the benefits of having such talented scientists joining them and is willing to make the extra effort to make it a success,” Sir Keith says. “We are often delighted with the welcome our fellows get by research groups where they will be learning, sometimes from scratch, what they will need to contribute to this new area. The investigators in their new labs are usually just as excited to be bringing someone from a new area who can really enhance the research capabilities of the group.”

This is where interdisciplinarity can yield a comparative scientific advantage, accelerating innovation as many minds from different fields are trained on a project. The type of project interdisciplinary scientists choose matters, too, as does the way they sell it to others. A researcher’s scientific goals must inspire interest from potential collaborators and grants committees, convincing others that the project is worth the investment of time and money. But they must also inspire the researcher. This excitement – allied to SSF support – can sustain scientists through the periods of doubt and difficulty they will face in the early stages of their interdisciplinary careers. 

“To my mind, this is one of the trickiest and most rewarding parts of being an SSF mentor,” Sir Keith says. “You are always aware of the courage needed to keep going through this period, and seeing them emerge as a scientific butterfly into the new world is a real treat. I have now seen this happen in so many fellows.”

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science.&nbsp;Find out how to participate.

Find out more about Schmidt Science Fellows.

It takes courage, ability and talent to transcend disciplinary boundaries. But it also takes support. At Schmidt Science Fellows, early career scientists are given the training and mentorship they need to develop their careers in interdisciplinary science and pursue projects that tackle society’s biggest problems

Coaching the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists

Advocates for interdisciplinary science need only to point to the world’s biggest problems to make their case. Climate change, food insecurity and 21st-century healthcare are all issues requiring scientific collaboration across disciplines. But if science is to realise the potential of interdisciplinarity, it must incentivise it.

Megan Kenna, executive director of Schmidt Science Fellows (SSF), says this remains the biggest challenge in the sector, which is why the organisation has partnered with Times Higher Education on a new ranking for interdisciplinary collaboration.

“Our incentive structure for science is at odds with how we believe science is best conducted to tackle global challenges,” Kenna says. “The world’s challenges know no disciplinary boundaries, so we must find ways to encourage scientists to work collaboratively across disciplines to solve them. While there is broad support for interdisciplinary science across higher education, how universities incentivise, recognise and reward scientists does not always encourage interdisciplinarity.” Kenna hopes that the THE ranking will help universities chart their progress toward interdisciplinary excellence and reward those who do it exceptionally well.

SSF was founded to support interdisciplinary science, training and developing the world’s brightest scientific minds to work together across disciplines. That might mean training in a different field. It will certainly mean teaching academics to communicate their ideas clearly and make their academic writing digestible for a broad scientific audience. “You cannot do science well unless you are able to communicate across those disciplines,” Kenna says. “It is a key part of all of this.”

Kenna recognises the demands made of academics and their time. Tenure and promotion committees can help steer academics towards interdisciplinarity by assessing candidates on their ability to collaborate and the impact their writing has had outside of their field. The academic structure also needs to recognise that failure is a feature of scientific endeavour, not a failing. Kenna argues that innovation will be stifled in an academic system that does not support academics when high-risk, high-reward hypotheses don’t bear fruit.

“We encourage our fellows to fail early and fail often. But fail early and learn from it. In fact, this is genuinely the scientific process,” Kenna says. “Failure is just data to be put back into the system and then see if the next thing works. Science would be boring if every experiment worked.” But when these big ideas work, the results can be spectacular. 

SSF fellows have delivered successful research in understanding why some cells resist cancer treatments. They have used advanced quantum mechanical simulations to test the speed limit of magnetism, opening up an avenue for innovation in magnetic-based memory devices and electronic circuits. 

Kenna cites the Covid-19 pandemic as a step change in how research was pursued. “We were hit with a challenge that couldn’t be solved by one discipline and required collaboration – and fast collaboration,” she says, noting that barriers between disciplines fell overnight. The speed with which vaccines were developed and rolled out is a testament to the power of interdisciplinary science and how it can accelerate innovation.

Times Higher Education&nbsp;has&nbsp;partnered with Schmidt Science Fellows to develop a&nbsp;new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to&nbsp;interdisciplinary science. Find out how to participate.

Find out more about Schmidt Science Fellows.

Society faces problems of growing complexity, and we need scientists collaborating across disciplines in search of better solutions and faster results

How higher education can promote interdisciplinary science and enhance impact

What is artificial intelligence? How we answer this question can be influenced heavily by our past exposure to AI-related ideas and stories, and the concomitant hope and fears they narrate. The emergence of generative AI tools has pushed discussion of AI and its impact to the forefront of conversation, yet many of us still have only a partial conception of what AI is, what it can do, and how to ensure it is used responsibly.How can we measure interdisciplinary learning?Collection:&nbsp;AI transformers like ChatGPT are here, so what next?ChatGPT and generative AI: 25 applications to support student engagementThis lack of clarity is a result of disciplinary fragmentation in how we approach AI, we argue. If we are to equip our students with the skills they need to truly understand AI as a technology and to embrace it as a force for positive social change, we must adopt a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to understanding and teaching AI.The relationship between AI and interdisciplinarityInterdisciplinarity is not a post-facto imposition on our account of AI, but an inherent part of its origins. Many of the ideas we associate with AI have their roots in the older discipline of cybernetics. Derived from the Greek, kubernētikēs – “steering” to mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener – cybernetics was the study of “control and communication in the animal and machine”.By bringing together ideas from fields as&nbsp;diverse as philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology and mathematics, Wiener envisioned a science in which technology was developed to work in concert with humanity, based on a holistic, interdisciplinary understanding of both. Cybernetics introduced the idea of an analogy between the computer processor and the human brain, claiming that a sufficiently sophisticated computer program could act as the intelligent “brain” of the computer.While cybernetics fell out of favour, much of its language and many of its ideas linger. Among mathematicians and behavioural and computer scientists, the focus around “intelligence” has shifted to autonomous “rational” behaviour, in which a programmed set of actions are selected based on a calculated expectation of maximised “utility”.In the humanities, however, the analogy with a humanlike intelligent machine remained a strong theme. Futurists popularised the idea of the singularity in which machines achieved full sentience, often spelling the end of biological humanity either through transcendence or destruction. These ideas offer an effective vehicle for self-reflection – as AI serves as a mirror to humanity through which we can examine ourselves – but also describe a technology that bears little resemblance to the academic and practical reality of AI.The real risks of AIThe problem, then, with this disciplinary divergence is a failure to appreciate that humans and technologies are continually and ineluctably in conversation and collaboration at every step of the development of AI. It becomes easy to oversimplify the risks of AI associated with sentience and replacement, presenting something of a red herring when it comes to the true risks.The real limitations of AI lie with problems such as the way machine learning can replicate and amplify human bias, the way poorly chosen data labels can create unfair behaviours, and that organisations may place excessive trust in an AI system as objective without recognising the extent to which human decision-making, with all its merits and foibles, has governed how that data is selected, processed and acted upon.Tackling AI risks with an interdisciplinary lensTo train students to responsibly engage with AI in society and the workplace, a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective is essential.Make understanding AI’s possibilities accessible to all studentsFirst, it is necessary to impart an accurate understanding of modern AI’s true nature and possibilities in a manner that is accessible to all students, not just those with the mathematical and technical expertise to take advanced-level computing classes (where AI courses typically reside).This can come through the language we use to talk about AI.&nbsp;Terms such as “thinking” and “learning” can be properly recognised as analogous only when it is understood that AI is driven by mathematics formulated not to “understand” phenomena but to calculate patterns to generate accurate predictions. Arguably, AI is more “A” than “I”, and so by looking under the hood, so to speak, we can appreciate accurately how it can be used selectively to solve human problems, yet also recognise its limitations with a richness that the language of analogy does not provide.Engage students with how human and machine work togetherSecond, we must revisit the core insight of cybernetics – of human and computer working in concert; we must engage not only with the mechanisms of the machine but the lived experiences of the human. It is not enough to treat AI ethics as a postscript to a technical course nor to tell students: “Don’t be evil.”It is only by developing a deeper understanding of how humans live together, how they work and how they relate to their environment that we can find opportunities for AI to enrich the human experience. To achieve systems like this, we must look beyond the limited data of any problem at hand and leverage the expertise of other disciplines and data surrounding – and even seemingly unconnected to – the challenge to offer the best solutions. A single-track approach to machine learning without appreciation of the multifarious nature of human experience will not advance our quality of life; it will simply ensure that we repeat the mistakes of the past.Interdisciplinarity is part of AI’s heritage and must be an integral part of its future if we wish to create a future where AI drives human flourishing. Our students must be equipped with this understanding because they will ultimately determine how AI is permitted to shape our future.Elvin Lim is dean of the College of Integrative Studies and Jonathan Chase is assistant professor of computer science (practice), both at Singapore Management University.If you’d like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

Interdisciplinarity is a core part of AI’s past and future

To train students to engage responsibly with artificial intelligence, a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective – from the language used to recognising that human and machine work in concert – is essential, write Elvin Lim and Jonathan Chase 

Interdisciplinarity is a core part of AI’s heritage and is entwined with its future

The landscape of doctoral education is shifting as we see an increasing number of large-scale programmes aimed at supporting larger cohorts of graduates, at both UK and European level.In contrast to traditional PhD programmes – which are mostly disciplinary, run at departmental level for students with limited shared interests who often experience financial challenges – such larger-scale doctoral programmes are predominantly interdisciplinary, developed at cross-departmental, institutional or even international level, involving large cohorts of more generously funded PhD students who share the research objectives of their programme.The distinct qualities of such programmes raise challenges regarding increased expectations for research excellence, genuine interdisciplinary research and cooperative rather than competitive learning. Distilled from my experience of leading such large-scale programme, here are 10 key insights to inform interdisciplinary doctoral supervision and learning:1. Be bold in aiming for two goals of interdisciplinarity: incremental augmentation of scientific knowledge and solving problems outside academia. Aim to achieve them both for richer learning experiences and development of students’ transferable skills.2. Think big to ensure the wider scope of interdisciplinarity by boldly bringing in conceptually closed disciplines such as engineering and physics as well as conceptually distant ones such as computer science and clinical psychology. Aim to integrate the key disciplines needed to address the goal of your interdisciplinarity doctoral programme, even if they are distant. While such “wide interdisciplinarity” requires additional support work, it also provides more stimulating and creative learning environments. For instance, we successfully engaged three disciplines seldom integrated: human-computer interaction, biomedical engineering and clinical psychology for the AffecTech Innovative Training Network, as they were all key for the design and development of innovative personalised technologies for affective health.3. Ensure the highest possible interaction and integration among the involved disciplines at both theoretical and methodological level. This should go beyond PhD students’ mere exposure to the separate disciplines and take different forms such as interdisciplinary learning teams, especially when focused on problem-based learning.4. Provide interdisciplinary doctoral supervision. PhD supervision lies at the core of doctoral education, and a co-supervision model is increasingly common. However, PhD projects addressing interdisciplinary topics require interdisciplinary supervisory expertise. While this can sometimes be provided by a sole academic, often two or three academics are needed to ensure&nbsp;it.5. Engage disciplines and supervisors who champion interdisciplinarity. Since interdisciplinary research expertise is challenging to acquire, supervisory support remains predominantly discipline-based. If&nbsp;possible, aim to include supervisors who have already worked at disciplinary boundaries. There are also disciplines that are particularly open to interdisciplinary research, so identifying those for the interdisciplinary needs of your PhD programme is a strong advantage. For instance, human-computer interaction is highly interdisciplinary, drawing from psychology, especially cognitive sciences, computer science, design and even arts and humanities as technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives.&nbsp;6. Celebrate the relevant disciplines. It is important to instil the values and attitudes needed for interdisciplinary doctoral education in the PhD students. Aim for learning and teaching methods where tolerance and respect for all contributing disciplinary perspectives is key, such as participatory research.7. Support the writing of interdisciplinary collaborative research papers. Writing papers is an important assessment method in doctoral education, but interdisciplinary ones raise particular challenges. Encourage doctoral students to collaborate on themes that can feed into each of their individual PhD projects. This has the advantage of supporting a culture of cooperative rather than competitive learning in doctoral programmes. Another challenge is that most reputable conferences and journals still work within disciplinary boundaries. Guide students’ academic writing both within their main discipline, usually the one for which the PhD degree will be awarded, but also at disciplinary boundaries. The latter is particularly challenging but represents excellent opportunity for learning transferable skills.8. Create space for reflection and critical thinking. The value of reflection and critical thinking in doctoral education cannot be overemphasised. Support it explicitly through bespoke teaching modules, and implicitly in supervision sessions and through feedback on students’ academic writing.9. Ensure support for supervisors. Interdisciplinary doctoral supervision is taxing as supervisors need to be willing to step out of the comfort of their own discipline. Aim to provide bespoke support through regular supervisory workshops where their concerns can be voiced and additional guidance or support can be provided as needed.10. Build resilience and support well-being. Finally, doctoral programmes are often transformative journeys, and, therefore, even more difficult when performed in an interdisciplinary context. Aim to provide additional support structures such as coaching and mentoring sessions, and personal development plans, so that students’ needs for learning additional skills can be met. This further supports their career aspirations whether in academic or industry settings. Together, such structures will help strengthen students’ resilience, confidence and well-being.Doctoral education is enormously challenging and rewarding, and in interdisciplinary form even more so. These guidelines are aimed at academics involved in the design and delivery of doctoral training programmes who wish to foster interdisciplinary learning environments that are highly supportive, creative, tolerant and cooperative.Corina Sas is professor in human-computer interaction and digital health, assistant dean for research enhancement at Lancaster University, and has led a UK doctoral training centre and two European Innovative Training Networks.She has been shortlisted for&nbsp;Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year at&nbsp;the&nbsp;THE Awards 2021. A full list of shortlisted candidates can be&nbsp;found here&nbsp;with the winners due to be announced at a ceremony on 25th November.&nbsp;Academics and university leaders from across the UK and Ireland will come together at THE&nbsp;Campus Live UK&amp;IE to discuss institutional strategies, teaching and learning, the student experience and more.&nbsp;Join us&nbsp;for this two-day event in London.

Corina Sas highlights key insights for design and delivery of large-scale doctoral training programmes that foster supportive and cooperative interdisciplinary learning environments 

Fostering interdisciplinary learning in large-scale doctoral programmes

“I never understood interdisciplinarity. How do you measure the learning?”This was the question that Daniel Seah’s mentor raised in 2021, when Daniel shared a decision to join the new College of Integrative Studies (CIS) at our university. The mentor began to recount an experience, as an undergraduate in the late 1970s, of being penalised for underplaying macroeconomics in favour of sociology in an essay for an economics and society module.This misgiving that interdisciplinary learning is hard to quantify is still common. It arises alongside an unmistakable professionalisation of interdisciplinarity &nbsp;(as it establishes foundations that involve specialised faculty and journals, for instance) at Singapore’s universities; all six autonomous universities in Singapore use the word “interdisciplinary” to describe their courses. So, can we dismiss interdisciplinarity as lacking a quantifiable core when it offers choices that serve our students’ professional interests in the long term?&nbsp;Spotlight: unpacking academic interdisciplinarityWhy we start undergraduate transdisciplinary research from day oneBuilding the future: the case for inter-faculty learningIn Singapore, we are entering a decisive phase in our professionalisation of interdisciplinary studies. Our debates must now move beyond what interdisciplinary studies mean and why the approach is necessary. The applied curricula at Singapore’s universities are focused on real-world problems. Every Singapore university is committed to preparing its graduates for employment in a Web3 milieu.Our focus now should be to explain how we will conduct – and measure – interdisciplinarity in its various forms for undergraduate learning. The goal is to convince employers that a graduate’s interdisciplinary degree, through integration, gives a compounded advantage to an entry-level employee. To achieve this outcome, we recommend an individualised approach. &nbsp;Set undergraduates a final-year projectUndergraduates at Singapore Management University are guaranteed a second major. For example, a student pursues a first major in business management with a second major in psychology, alongside pre-assigned core curriculum modules that apply to all undergraduates. This is a familiar form of multidisciplinarity within established assessment structures.What if we allowed a student (let’s call her Jane) at an early phase of the degree journey to decide on a final-year project instead? This project is the basis on which Jane selects modules, which coherently integrate Jane’s core disciplinary expertise with at least one other discipline. These modules provide the academic rigour to support Jane’s final-year project. The completed project is evidence of interdisciplinarity.Let’s say that Jane’s core disciplinary expertise is sociology. The approved final-year project is a thesis on the cultural narratives of two photojournalists based in the Philippines and Spain, respectively. The project’s academic focus represents Jane’s intellectual interests. The thesis component of Jane’s interdisciplinary journey requires her to enrol in a combination of modules such as arts, culture and management, and the politics of South-east Asia. Jane will also take modules unrelated to sociology or arts management, such as user experience and digital product design.&nbsp;Faculty supervision of each studentThis individualised approach, which receives careful supervision from at least one faculty member per student, is pioneered by the CIS at our university. A committee of faculty members oversees and approves every student’s proposed combination of modules to ensure meaningful integration to the final-year project. The outcome would be graduates who develop an agency through lifelong learning,&nbsp;having practised self-directed learning from the first day of their undergraduate experience.Students’ project portfolios can evidence their learningThis extent of faculty oversight reflects a distinctive measurement of interdisciplinarity: demonstrating the practical skills of Jane’s chosen trade to a potential employer. In this case, Jane’s choice is a career as a UI/UX (user interface/user experience) designer. Apart from the thesis component, Jane must submit an individualised portfolio to show the practical value of the thesis’ propositions for an employer of UI/UX designers.This portfolio will be a website that chronicles the thesis’ journey from start to finish. The website will demonstrate, for example, Jane’s hard skills in Figma, Illustrator, JavaScript, CSS and HTML. The website also proves Jane’s skills, by reframing the thesis’ findings, through photography, user flow, user journey and wireframe. To a UI/UX employer, this portfolio demonstrates the graduate’s hard and creative skills in narrative design. The portfolio, in turn, is derived from Jane’s core academic interests in comparative sociology.A litmus test for value of interdisciplinary learningThis interdisciplinary approach is time-consuming and only viable when student intake is kept low – at CIS, this is about 50 students per year. The supervising faculties are assigned based on their training in interdisciplinarity. This approach is only one contribution to the professionalisation of interdisciplinary studies in Singapore. A litmus test will be the employers’ reception to this approach when our graduates enter the job market.The misgivings about the evidence of interdisciplinary learning have a provenance that precedes Web1. In the early 1980s, William Newell famously debated Thomas Benson’s polemic on the Five Arguments against Interdisciplinary Studies. This debate galvanised educators to validate their claims of interdisciplinarity through the professionalisation of curricula.Recently, a graduating computer science student contacted us after the final seminar of a digital law and technological innovations module. “Though I might never see you again, I will remember the valuable lessons I learned in your class (and try my best not to be a negligent software engineer),” he said. We had actively explored how legal proximity arises between people involved in the machine-learning life cycle and a victim of negligence. One such person is the software engineer who creates artificial intelligence models as a purely technical and backend task without considering the impact on users.&nbsp;&nbsp;How might we measure interdisciplinary learning? Here, the answer is clear: a student recognises how the law directly holds her accountable as a software engineer, and also protects her professional interests.&nbsp;Elvin Lim is dean of the College of Integrative Studies and Daniel Seah is assistant professor of law (education), both at Singapore Management University.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

A benchmark of success for interdisciplinary learning is graduates who have the flexibility to examine their areas of interest and develop attributes that deliver practical value to future employers    

How can we measure interdisciplinary learning?

We are huge fans of undergraduate transdisciplinary research. From their first year until their graduation, we would like all undergraduates to engage in collaborative and cross-disciplinary research-led enquiry.Why? Because it gives them an early opportunity to experience knowledge discovery first-hand, putting their learning into action. Students also develop team-building, writing, digital- and video-research, and presentation skills. All these capacities are precisely what employers around the world are pleading for, and research of different types helps to seed an inventive and adaptable mindset in our students.Helping students to see the future career value of their work-integrated learningBuilding the future: the case for inter-faculty learningSeven lessons from interdisciplinary general education curriculum reformMost importantly, such a focus enables students to undertake projects, with appropriate teammates and faculty support, that are deeply meaningful to them. It matters what research they do, with whom and for what reasons.In 2012, the Hong Kong government mandated an extension of three-year undergraduate degrees to four years. Each university created its own curricular expansion and the University of Hong Kong (HKU) worked through a complex collegial process to establish the common core. A six-course requirement for all our 17,000-plus undergraduate students, the programme opens up opportunities for students to experience enquiry-based learning and multiple forms of research.Divided into four areas of enquiry – science, technology and big data; arts and humanities; global issues; and China – the 170-plus courses are designed specifically for this core curriculum. This is a key aspect of our role as a sandbox for pedagogical innovation and allows wide-ranging experimentation for colleagues across all 10 faculties. The innovations in design, teaching and assessment – financially supported by the university budget – benefit students and teachers; departments, schools and faculties; and the university as a whole.&nbsp;What does transdisciplinary research offer undergraduates?With this background in mind, let us describe three of the primary transdisciplinary research opportunities for students.The first is project-based work within the courses. Students have many chances to be involved in self-directed research projects, collaborating with classmates from across all 10 faculties. Projects cover such topics as digital humanitarianism, technology and cultural heritage, rural renewal projects, designs on the future and making (sense of) money. (The Areas of Inquiry tab gives access to course trailers and outlines.)The second arena for such research is undergraduate team or individual projects, conceived by the students. A faculty mentor provides light-touch guidance on projects as they are completed and prepared for public exhibit. At HKU, the Transdisciplinary Undergraduate Research Initiative funds this programme.The third set of research opportunities are projects of joint interest undertaken in partnership with NGOs, multinationals and other organisations. Current examples include collaborations with Arup (on lighting at night in Hong Kong), the Absolutely Fantastic Theatre Connection (creativity and transdisciplinarity), Press Start (on designing games for learning), Salween Experiential Journeys (digital storytelling), the University of Birmingham Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences programme and a global action lab with Utrecht University.We believe that the sooner students experience creative, multidisciplinary, research-led thinking, the better. Such enquiry enhances social connectivity in their campuses and their cities, and enables methodological, conceptual and practical approaches for thinking among students. Critically, the connection between teaching and research for both students and faculty is strengthened across and beyond the campus.In order to offer a more flexible and impactful curriculum, we have badged our courses with the UN’s sustainable development goals, created transdisciplinary minors, are working on global partnerships and will soon offer microcredentials in a compressed format. We are constantly reviewing our performance through student surveys, course evaluations for renewal, direct student reflections on projects, informal conversations and deep interaction with our external examiners.What is next for undergraduate transdisciplinary research? There is significant space for us to build out the activities further, particularly in connecting globally to enable international collaborations and deepening engagements for our students. The rapid normalisation of video-conferencing during the pandemic has catalysed the possibilities surrounding global classrooms, and initiatives such as collaborative online international learning (Coil) further connect students and teachers to discussions, research and experiential learning within and beyond individual courses. We very much look forward to collaborating with both universities and other partner organisations on undergraduate transdisciplinary research as it becomes more established as a global best practice.Gray Kochhar-Lindgren is honorary professor of humanities and co-facilitator of the Critical Zones Global-Action-Lab at the University of Hong Kong&nbsp;(HKU), as well as a founding director of Wild Studios Consulting and Creative Productions. He served as director of HKU’s common core from 2014 to 2022.Julian Tanner is director of the common core and professor of biomedical sciences in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Hands-on knowledge discovery can give students the chance to put learning into action from the beginning of their studies, write Gray Kochhar-Lindgren and Julian Tanner

Why we start undergraduate transdisciplinary research from day one

The return to campus has been well documented as important in the post-disaster recovery period. And certainly, after several years of disruption to education, it has been exciting and cathartic to see university campuses full of students and the vibrancy of connections, especially when we know that young people have been prevented from partaking in various rites of passage and could be struggling to develop relationships and learn vital interpersonal skills.Nonetheless, Hepi and the Office for Students have noted that we still have to give students a reason to attend in person and cannot pivot back to pre-pandemic learning. We must instead take a holistic approach to the student experience, use of space on campus and learning. Matt Riddle of Hepi states: “Universities need a plan that puts emphasis on the value of the learning experience. With many lecture halls standing empty, universities need to think about how they earn the commute. This means not only giving learners a sense of belonging and community but also designing learner experiences around the things that make an on-campus experience distinctive.”As a criminologist and an engineer, we use the campus and its physical spaces in very different ways. In online meetings during lockdowns, we recognised the value of, and longed for, physical place and in-person teaching. We decided to launch an innovative inter-faculty way of working to provide students with an excellent student experience. We had each wanted to work in a cross-faculty way and randomly finding one another led to this being born. After all, there is so much that different disciplines can offer each other; sometimes you just need to give it a go.The challenges of creating a multidisciplinary research centre and how to overcome themInterdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it workHow to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinarity in studentsWe each run a capstone module for final-year students, one being an alternative dissertation in the social sciences and the other an engineering dissertation module. As part of our new, inter-faculty way of working, both the engineering and social science students are given three-minute pitches on projects related to the development and implementation of innovative engineering products or systems. Some examples are accessible cycles, solar power refrigeration, a circular economy for campus plastic waste, or urban wind energy. Students then join teams, with the engineers learning industry-standard system development skills and the social science students there to provide consultation, scoping out of the related literature, research questions, ethical considerations and identifying concerns relating to gender, race, class, disability, age, etc.One of the projects of particular interest to our sustainability agenda is our campus circular economy, where we recycle plastic waste into new products for sale in our university shops. Not only is this giving students a real-world problem and allowing them to devise a strategy to solve it, but students working inter-faculty will imagine completely new ways to frame the issue by utilising their different skill sets and building something new.The modules we have designed for the project are committed to the Liverpool Curriculum Framework, spanning all of its seven strands: inclusivity; research-led learning; active learning; authentic assessments; confidence; digital fluency; and global citizenship. They also provide students with the ability to make friends and colleagues from across the university, give them a physical space to do this and encourage them to develop key personal and professional skills. The students learn through a mixture of lectures, group supervision, peer-led meetings, careers-led sessions and off-site opportunities. They also have the chance to collaborate with industry partners globally.Over the past three years students have had limited opportunities to meet new people and develop their confidence. We wanted to provide them with incentives to develop their people skills and be exposed to new ways of thinking from peers they were otherwise unlikely to meet. We must also understand the student experience in the context of the cost-of-living crisis, with many people unable to afford socialising.Being able to confidently communicate with those outside your field is a key employability skill, and using enquiry-based learning in this way involves developing and nurturing relationships and negotiating aspects of project work. Students are expected to manage their own projects, show leadership and creativity, influence others through collaboration and take risks. They develop resilience, independence and the ability to think outside the box. They are also asked to show what went wrong, in addition to their successes, which helps normalise failure, with all the positives that can entail.Our modules are owned by our respective faculties with our own learning outcomes and assessments, and yet the projects collide. Students from each faculty provide consultation, support and feedback to their colleagues and peers and log this continuously to an industry standard. The project helps provide students with academic knowledge, personal development and the competencies and skills that are needed in professional life, which, in turn, can help address inequalities in graduate employment.To make such a project happen, you will need to start with a tangible issue that needs solving; students need to see a real-world problem. Matt is chair of our Education in Sustainable Development group, and Gemma is a faculty rep for the group, thus all our options in this project centre around sustainability. Identify interested stakeholders within your department, school, faculty and institution and have conversations with your education leads. Think about practicalities such as timetabling needs and other potential obstacles to inter-faculty working. Communication is key, both among academic colleagues and students. This way of working can be challenging, and it is important that students are supported throughout by regular timetabled group supervisions.We have had interest in this way of working from other disciplines, faculties and colleagues nationally and are happy to be contacted by any interested parties.Gemma Ahearne is a lecturer in criminology and Matt Murphy is a senior lecturer in engineering, both at the University of Liverpool, UK.If you found this interesting and want advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the&nbsp;THE Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Launching an innovative inter-faculty way of working has brought great benefit to students, especially in the post-Covid period, say Gemma Ahearne and Matt Murphy

Building the future: the case for inter-faculty learning

In soccer, the players, coaching staff, medical teams and the club’s board have a common goal: win games to claim the championship. Each member contributes in his or her way according to their specialism, abilities and strengths.This is a great example of interdisciplinary teamwork, where the various areas of expertise of a group of people each add value to a project. For universities, the pandemic brought with it the added challenge of not being able to be physically together, meaning remote collaboration was required and has now almost certainly become a practice that will endure over time.But how can academics, who can struggle to work with other disciplines at the best of times, achieve interdisciplinary team success without the “presence” component? In this article, we share some strategies for management and collaboration in designing online courses.Establish flexible roles&nbsp;Each member can and should contribute using their own specialty in terms of profession, abilities and personal interests, from instructional designers and teachers to tutors and academic coordinators. Identify the diverse profiles available and organise the group into a team with complementary skills and a common goal. And make sure that everyone is mutually responsible for the result.Implement strategies to generate creative ideas&nbsp;It’s a good idea to plan exclusive ideation sessions in which all team members can participate without any restrictions or limitations. To help activate thinking outside the box, apply a methodology or strategy that encourages creativity, such as design thinking, blue ocean strategy or the Scamper technique, among others.Create a virtual learning community for your team&nbsp;This should be a shared space to interact, create knowledge, exchange information, publish results and socialise. Even a digital network should develop a sense of identity, belonging and loyalty, favouring human and emotional connection. Fairly basic tech tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Docs and Workplace can be used promote collaboration, but always ensure everyone involved is comfortable with a platform before implementing it and provide training for anyone who isn’t.Design content in real time&nbsp;Be sure to create moments of synchronous collaboration where the entire team meets together. Apply methodologies such as think tank, bootcamp and startup, among others. Such sessions allow the team to obtain solutions in a staggered manner and promote team integration by focusing on short challenges and concrete results.Use emotional connection activities to build trust&nbsp;Remember that this is a group of people from different disciplines who do not necessarily know each other in person. Thus, schedule moments within work sessions to strengthen group bonds via emotional connection activities. These help build trust in the group and foster a sense of belonging. It’s easy to add a fun element to icebreaking and integration activities using tech tools such as Wheel Decide, Jamboard or Padlet.Schedule recurring meetings to monitor progress&nbsp;Assign the same time every week to review progress with the team. The session must be short to be effective; no more than one hour. Bearing in mind the need to be agile, ask each team member to bring a summary of their work and activity status to the session.Lean on apps for real-time monitoring&nbsp;Several digital applications, including&nbsp;Asana&nbsp;or&nbsp;Slack,&nbsp;can help manage teamwork remotely. These platforms are highly effective because you can use them to perform multiple functions, such as register collaborators, view a dashboard with project progress in real-time, identify critical points and instant message between colleagues, among others.Close the project&nbsp;Call a virtual meeting at the end of the project in which you acknowledge teamwork, record lessons learned, hand over the project to management and release the team. Additionally, be sure to monitor the operation of the project and use analytics tools to document continuous improvement.An interdisciplinary team must be prepared and able to adapt to new ways of managing distance collaboration. The benefits include optimisation of time, flexibility and welcoming international and multicultural experts.Rocío Elizabeth Cortez Márquez is a teacher and academic coordinator at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico. She has more than 10 years of experience in classroom, hybrid and distance educational models.Elia Esther Mendoza Carabeo is a teacher and leader of educational innovation at Tecnológico de Monterrey. She has more than 18 years of experience in innovative educational models in face-to-face, hybrid and distance learning.

Rocío Elizabeth Cortez Márquez and Elia Esther Mendoza Carabeo give advice on making interdisciplinary teams work online

Eight essential tips for remote interdisciplinary teamwork

Saving the world is no easy task. But it’s one that academics all over the world have found themselves tasked with on multiple occasions over the past two years.No single traditional “discipline” would ever have been capable of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic in the way we have: identifying the virus; creating tests that can identify those who are infected; developing and distributing multiple vaccines worldwide; and developing new technologies that allow us to return to something approaching “normal” life again.For those who missed it, the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures introduced by Jonathan Van-Tam illustrated this beautifully. Mankind has historically made the greatest technological breakthroughs when facing a common enemy. Traditional academic boundaries are forgiven, and we are driven to do our best work by learning from our colleagues in other disciplines – but isn’t this exactly what the best industrial companies already do?Why interdisciplinarity is just like a fantasy role-playing gameAll together now: how to write an interdisciplinary research proposalCreating equitable research partnerships across continents&nbsp;True interdisciplinarity is messy, disruptive and difficult to manage, but it is also where the best revolutionary ideas come from. Separate disciplines are there to help create and develop communities of practice: groups of experts with the same expertise who can support one another, progress their own discipline and teach the next generation. However, these discipline-specific groups will struggle to solve more complex, real-world challenges, and it’s never too early for universities, faculty and students to begin thinking about this.If society is to succeed in meeting, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals, academic teams working across discipline boundaries will be needed. Here are some key things to consider when preparing staff and students to work and teach across disciplines:Build an inclusive cultureThe most important element of creating and sustaining multidisciplinary teams is building an inclusive culture. Students and/or staff who are thinking about such challenges must start by acknowledging that no&nbsp;one member of the team would be capable of solving this problem alone and agreeing that credit and funding for the work should be shared. Without clear agreement from the outset, such projects are doomed to fail from death by a thousand cuts.In the UK, research funding calls often include the words “collaboration” or “interdisciplinary” in their title to reflect the funders’ expectation that more than one discipline will be needed to meet the challenge or build the required industrial capability.Adopt the right approachOf course, working in interdisciplinary teams is essential in the modern work environment. Encouraging students to engage with live projects (created using real business needs and curated by academics to ensure that students can demonstrate the required learning) is vital in providing them with teamworking skills and an understanding of how to work across academic boundaries.The real world of work is never “fair” and seldom easy, so it’s important that students gain a taste of what is to come once they join their chosen profession. A&nbsp;“can&nbsp;do” approach to these projects and a willingness to learn new things is highly prized by industry and will provide graduates with skills that can be learned only by experience rather than by explanation.Build appropriate teaching teamsCreating interdisciplinary teaching and learning teams can pose a particularly tricky challenge. Pedagogies that suit one discipline may not be the most appropriate for another. Learners are attracted to their chosen discipline not only on the basis of the material content of their course but also a shared identity with the culture and practices of certain associated careers.Academics, meanwhile, are traditionally promoted as a result of their specialist expertise and (in the very best teaching universities) teaching excellence in their field. However, there are also many examples of academics in senior positions imposing what they believe “works” across multiple disciplines, resulting in poor progression and unhappy students for whom this pedagogical model is not a good fit.Developing a multidisciplinary teaching and learning programme requires academics who are confident enough to acknowledge that they do not know everything. They also need to have the ability to work with colleagues and share their experiences of their students and their teaching. This is not a comfortable position in which to put oneself, particularly for more senior academics who want to preserve their status with colleagues. However, for those willing to step out of their comfort zone, the benefits are there to be had.Acknowledging that there are very few instances where a direct transplant of teaching and learning methodologies is feasible between disciplines, working with colleagues with different students, who approach challenges differently and whose assessment strategy may differ wildly from your own, means there’s a smorgasbord of new tools and techniques to try. Collaboration between the disciplines to create a truly interdisciplinary programme will yield benefits for all involved.With unprecedented evidence of the value of interdisciplinarity across academia, it’s time for all of us to seize the opportunity to develop new courses, extend our knowledge and, potentially, play a part in the next big breakthrough.Georgina Harris is dean of the Faculty of STEM at Arden University, UK.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Recent events have shown the necessity of working together, and it’s never too early for universities, faculty and students to begin thinking about this, says Georgina Harris

How to lay the groundwork for interdisciplinarity in students

When I think about interdisciplinarity, I cannot help but think back to the days when I was encouraged by a group of friends to join in with their role-playing boardgames. Every week I enjoyed these entertaining gatherings, immersed in fantasy worlds populated by incredible heroes, scurrilous villains and various otherworldly creatures.These adventure boardgames require each player to assume a specific role and become responsible for the actions of fictional characters, from fierce barbarians in charge of doling out damage and brave paladins acting as shields to mystical clerics who heal the wounds of their fellow party members.The skillset and role of each character is significantly different from one another, but the fate of their homeland cannot rest in the hands of a single hero. They must join forces, embrace everyone’s unique powers and work together to save their world.How to successfully develop and run interdisciplinary research teamsAll together now: how to write an interdisciplinary research proposalWe must rethink PhDs to smash barriers and ensure bioscience success&nbsp;Nowadays, in real life as a learning professional, I still apply the lessons of those game sessions within the interdisciplinary teams I work in that solve challenges in the world of higher education.The interdisciplinary nature of big projects often means that teams are put together consisting of numerous people who are passionate about their varying disciplines and have different strengths and knowledge areas. To succeed, this sometimes-disparate group of experts must align with the goals, tasks and expectations of the group by communicating and understanding one another’s roles.However, there are obstacles to be overcome from the very start in order to be constructive while working together. In my experience, the best way to face these challenges is to allow people to become “learners of everything” – providing opportunities to learn and get answers directly from experts via curiosity-led moments.In role-playing games, the source of a wizard’s magic is intense study and discipline. They might oversee the analysis of literature because of their scholarly personality. In contrast, a monk, who is a master of martial arts, might guide the training sessions that will help the team to engage in an upcoming battle. Indeed, there is much crossover between these epic adventures and real-life projects – both involve exploiting the traits and qualities of all members and learning from each other. Keeping these role-playing games in mind, here’s my take on the best practices for successful interdisciplinary collaboration and specific things you will need to consider for each one:Choose your adventure (define the problem and objectives)&nbsp;Coming up with a good definition is the first and most important step, especially for describing the problem/goal to anyone joining the team. The stated objectives must provide a specific solution to that problem. As a result, those objectives will be helpful in identifying the roles required for team members.Things to think about: what problem do we want to solve? Is it too complex for one discipline to solve? What are we striving to achieve?Explore your surroundings (conduct the literature research)During this stage, it’s important to consult numerous sources to gain insight and identify relevant disciplines. These resources will be useful for designing preparatory reading material such as benchmarks, infographics and summaries to share with team members.Things to think about: where can we find information about this problem? Which are the disciplines we need for this project? What curated content should we share with our potential teammates?Weapons training and inventory check (hold a warm-up session)&nbsp;A kick-off session in an inviting environment that makes people curious about learning from one another will be crucial to fostering an interdisciplinary mindset. Encourage all parties to reflect on their backgrounds, expectations and roles through suitable activities. These should trigger creativity and promote flexible thinking to ensure all contributions and insights are valued.Things to think about: what can we learn from others? What are our expectations of this collaboration? How can we trigger meaningful conversations about our backgrounds?Elvish or Draconic? (find a common language)&nbsp;Successful collaboration requires fully understanding your teammates – and technical language may be the main obstacle. Arranging quick, daily meetings is a good idea, with team members sharing experiences around projects and research to help everyone become familiar with the jargon and concepts from other areas.Things to think about: what are the main concepts from our discipline? Which synonyms could we use to describe those concepts?Sharing out the treasure (achievements and lessons learned)&nbsp;It’s crucial that you take the time to share your findings within your interdisciplinary communities and other institutions through articles, videos or infographics. It also goes without saying that credit must be suitably and fairly attributed.Things to think about: what are we going to share? What is the proper format for sharing this information?The people and characters that come along on these journeys are what make interdisciplinary work such a worthwhile adventure. Be sure to create communities of fellow “learners of everything” to keep curiosity alive and partake in ongoing conversations about your projects and the best practices.Lorena Quilantán García is a learning architect in the innovation for education department at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus&nbsp;newsletter.

Who’s the barbarian? Which one’s the wizard? Lorena Quilantán García offers practical advice on embarking upon your very own interdisciplinary hero quest

Why interdisciplinarity is just like a fantasy role-playing game

Three PhD students share tips for embracing an interdisciplinary approach to research from the start of one’s academic career to aid progress towards tackling the Sustainable Development Goals 

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: investing in early career interdisciplinarity 

Finding opportunities for students across campus to gain real-world experience in their disciplines can be challenging. One strategy to create these opportunities is to build cross-department collaborations that capitalise on the interests and talents of different student disciplines.So,&nbsp;media students could work with student research teams to creatively communicate their projects to wider audiences. A collaboration between the undergraduate research office and the communications department can provide a wealth of topics and subjects for hands-on creative projects, such as writing features for the campus newspaper or creating a podcast of student research projects. At the same time, this engagement with the media provides a hugely valuable opportunity for the research students to practise their communication skills.Mini documentaries to communicate researchA collaborative project that fosters creativity while amplifying research is student-produced mini documentaries, or stories, about student research projects. Teams of production students do everything, from logistics – such as scheduling, writing interview questions, adjusting lighting in the studio and&nbsp;setting up camera equipment – to filming and editing. Research students from a variety of disciplines, but largely STEM departments, serve as the “talent” in the stories.How film storytelling can enhance learning in STEM subjectsUsing animation to stimulate learner engagementResource collection: Creativity in higher educationThe biggest impact of the project on the research students is gaining experience in sharing their science and other research projects in a format that isn’t typically part of an undergraduate curriculum. At many institutions, research students practise more “academic” forms of communication, such as giving presentations at conferences; but an opportunity to practise communicating with the mass media is a valuable addition to their professional development. Both groups of students can share their work –&nbsp;mini documentaries as well as research results – as part of an annual campus-wide research and scholarship celebration.Benefits of interdisciplinary collaborationExposure to other student viewpoints is powerful and several of our students who took part in such a project reported that working as part of an interdisciplinary team broadened their perspectives and made them more confident in their abilities within their own discipline. By collaborating on a creative project, each student could contribute his or her own strengths to a shared goal with better outcomes than they could achieve on their own.The mini documentaries created during this project can also be used as promotional materials by both the communication department and the undergraduate research office for recruiting new students into this or similar projects outside of the classroom. Communication students can see concrete examples of creative projects they could work on in telecommunication and film, offering them&nbsp;a better insight into possible careers within that field. Students across campus can view the research projects featured in the stories to&nbsp;gain a better understanding of what research projects might be possible on campus. Since the ideas being presented come from other students, getting engaged in research may feel more achievable.Lessons from running creative collaborationsName a leader: It worked well to assign one student as the team leader on each team. The leaders felt more ownership of the films and ensured that the projects kept moving forward.Introduce the project: At the start of the semester, we hosted a meeting of all participating students and faculty involved in the project. We gave students an overview of the project, including the goals and benefits, and introduced the teams. That proved an effective way to make initial connections within teams and ensure everyone felt like they were part of a larger&nbsp;overall&nbsp;project.Universal standards: It was helpful to create standard unifying features of the mini documentaries, including the approximate length for each, common interview questions&nbsp;and use of the undergraduate research office logo.Research experience: We selected research students with at least one semester of research experience before the project, so they had developed communication skills in more traditional settings, including writing a research project proposal or presenting at a conference.Safety first: We headed off potential safety issues of filming in STEM labs by reaching out to faculty at the start to let them know that filming in their lab spaces would be pre-approved by them and that film students had identified alternate locations as backups.A project like this that&nbsp;pairs research students with communication students provides real-world experience that will benefit both groups and leave them better prepared for their next steps. Furthermore, the stories created can be used to recruit the next group of student participants and build towards a more creative culture on campus.Allison Schwartz is director of undergraduate research at the University of West Florida.If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,&nbsp;sign up for the Campus newsletter.

How creative collaborations can link research and humanities

Creative collaborations between students in different disciplines can offer opportunities to gain “real world” experience and apply their knowledge in new contexts. Allison Schwartz explains how

Interdisciplinarity

Advice for bringing together multiple academic disciplines into one project or approach, examples of interdisciplinary collaboration done well and how to put interdisciplinarity into practice in research, teaching, leadership and impact

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Advice for bringing together multiple academic disciplines into one project or approach, examples of interdisciplinary collaboration done well and how to put interdisciplinarity into practice in research, teaching, leadership and impact

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