Volume IV: What works, what matters, what lasts

Fostering Interdisciplinary Research

November 1, 2006

"...creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organization, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mountains for futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners."
   — Max Perutz.

This essay from the 2005 Research Corporation Annual Report explores the critical obstacles to shaping interdisciplinary environments for research in scientific fields. These include:

  • existing institutional structures
  • tenure and promotion criteria
  • the education and training of the researchers of tomorrow
  • issues of communication, including time and space
  • funding organizations and peer review.

The options presented for overcoming those obstacles range from attention at the undergraduate level to shaping innovative spaces to foster communication.

To Thrive and Prosper
An essay on how “to thrive and prosper: hiring, supporting, and tenuring interdisciplinary scholars” outlines a set of principles addressing the several stages of a faculty career– from appointment on– that need attention if the community is to realize its objectives of fostering interdisciplinary research and learning. It outlines how to shape structures and incentives that reflect and nurture an interdisciplinary culture.
Research Corporation Annual Report 2005
This essay from the 2005 Research Corporation Annual Report explores the critical obstacles to shaping interdisciplinary environments for research in scientific fields.
Excerpts from the NRC Report Bio2010
"Biological concepts and models are becoming more quantitative, and biological research has become critically dependent on concepts and methods drawn from other scientific disciplines. The connections between the biological sciences and the physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science are rapidly becoming deeper and more extensive. The ways that scientists communicate, interact, and collaborate are undergoing equally rapid and dramatic transformations..."
How Academic Institutions Can Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research
The report from the National Academies of Science, How Academic Institutions Can Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research, addresses the complexity as well as the necessity of taking a kaleidoscopic perspective, with an intriguing analysis of how to build a research-rich, interdisciplinary learning environment. Their insight, that "at the heart of interdisciplinary is communication— the conversations, connections, and combinations that bring new insights to virtually every kind of scientist and engineer" reinforces both the goals and strategies of 21st century agents of change.