what are research disciplines

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Learn About Interdisciplinary Research

Research approaches.

• Interdisciplinary Research
• Convergence Research
• Transformative Research

The U.S. National Science Foundation gives high priority to research that is interdisciplinary — transcending the scope of a single discipline or program.

NSF's support of interdisciplinary research and education is essential for accelerating scientific discovery and preparing a workforce that addresses scientific challenges in innovative ways.

This page covers the ways NSF supports interdisciplinary research and how to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal, including how to submit an unsolicited proposal when there is no natural " home " for it in one of NSF’s existing programs.

On this page

• ● What is interdisciplinary research?
• ● How does NSF support interdisciplinary research?
• ● How to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal
• ● Who to contact
• ● Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What is interdisciplinary research?

Credit: Jurgen Schulze, University of California, San Diego

The definition of a "discipline" and the varieties of cross-disciplinary research — from multidisciplinary, to interdisciplinary, to transdisciplinary — are constantly evolving. Although there is not always agreement on these definitions, it is clear that areas of research are dynamic: continually emerging, melding and transforming. What is considered interdisciplinary today might be considered disciplinary tomorrow.

A working definition of interdisciplinary research can be found in the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's report, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research :

Interdisciplinary research:

• Integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge.
• Can be done by teams or by individuals.
• Advances fundamental understanding or solves problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.

How does NSF support interdisciplinary research?

1. Solicited interdisciplinary research

Numerous NSF programs are designed to be explicitly interdisciplinary. Solicitations, which invite proposals to these programs, are posted on the NSF website . NSF's interdisciplinary research programs broadly fall under the three categories below:

Cross-cutting programs

Many of NSF's interdisciplinary programs involve several of NSF's directorates. Examples of these programs include:

• Building Theoretical Foundations for Data Sciences (TRIPODS)
• Coastlines and People
• Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems
• Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases  
• Growing Convergence Research
• Research on Emerging Technologies for Teaching and Learning
• Smart and Connected Communities

Areas of national importance

NSF develops funding portfolios that focus on complex societal challenges of national interest, often in collaboration with other federal agencies. Examples of these programs include:

• The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier
• National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes
• Navigating the New Arctic
• Understanding the Rules of Life

Center competitions

Many of the centers funded by NSF bring together interdisciplinary research teams. Examples of NSF's center competitions include:

• Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers
• Science and Technology Centers

2. Unsolicited interdisciplinary research

NSF invites interdisciplinary proposals that are not targeted by a program solicitation, as long as they are appropriate for NSF support . Depending on its focus, such a proposal may:

• Be reviewed by a single core program.
• Be co-reviewed by more than one program.
• Extend beyond the scope of any current program.

See " How to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal " to learn how to submit an unsolicited interdisciplinary research proposal.

3. Education and training

NSF has numerous programs supporting the development of the next generation of researchers. The support from these programs is in addition to the support for undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to conduct research on NSF-funded grants. Examples of these programs include:

• Research Traineeship Program
• Research Experiences for Undergraduates

4. Workshops, conferences and symposiums

NSF sponsors forums designed to promote interdisciplinary perspectives and research.

How to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal

Preparing an unsolicited interdisciplinary proposal.

Follow the guidance below for how to submit a proposal with ideas that are in novel or emerging areas extending beyond any particular NSF program.

1. Prepare a summary of your proposal ideas.

Develop a short 1–2 paragraph description of your proposal idea that you can send by email and discuss with NSF staff. Make sure your idea is appropriate for NSF funding by viewing the Programs and Funding Opportunities section of the agency's Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide .

2. Contact an NSF program officer.

The program officer you contact will provide guidance on how and where to submit your proposal. To find an appropriate program officer, consider these options in the following order:

• Identify a program officer through an existing NSF program. In many cases, there will be an existing NSF program for which the proposal idea may be appropriate. Read the program description or solicitation. If your idea seems appropriate, contact one of the program’s program officers.
• Identify a program officer through other means. If your proposal doesn’t clearly fit an existing program, it may make sense to first contact a program officer with expertise in your discipline. They may consult with other NSF staff or recommend another officer for you to contact. You may also contact a program officer you already know, such as one who is managing an award for you or who you met at a conference. 
• Contact a point of contact listed below. If you think your proposal will be of particular interest to one NSF directorate or office, reach out to the relevant point of contact for that directorate. That person is responsible for identifying a program officer in that directorate who will discuss your proposal with you.

Points of contact:

The contacts below are responsible for identifying a program officer in their directorate who will discuss your proposal with you.

If there is not an obvious point of contact from one of the options below, email NSF at [email protected] or call (703) 292-4840.

Cross-directorate, NSF-wide

Jessica Robin, OD/OISE

Telephone: (703) 292-8706

Email: [email protected]

Office of Integrative Activities

Randy Phelps, OD/OIA

Telephone: (703) 292-5049

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Biological Sciences

James O. Deshler, BIO/DBI

Telephone: (703) 292-7871

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

James Donlon, CISE/CCF

Telephone: (703) 292-8074

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Education and Human Resources

Gregg E. Solomon, EHR/DRL

Telephone: (703) 292-8333

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Engineering

Sohi Rastegar, ENG/OAD

Telephone: (703) 292-5379

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Geosciences

Barbara Ransom , GEO/OAD

Telephone: (703) 292-7792

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Dean Evasius, MPS/OAD

Telephone: (703) 292-7352

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences

Brian Humes, SBE/SES

Telephone: (703) 292-7281

Email: [email protected]

Preparing a proposal for an existing program?

If you are submitting a proposal to an existing program that is designed to be interdisciplinary or encourages interdisciplinary work, simply prepare your proposal in accordance with the program description or solicitation.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

1. does an interdisciplinary proposal have to be transformative.

No. The extent to which a proposed project is potentially transformative is just one of the considerations included in NSF's Intellectual Merit review criterion. See NSF's " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide " for more details.

2. Will interdisciplinary proposals be given preference when funding recommendations are made?

If a proposal is reviewed through an existing NSF program, this will depend on the program's criteria.

Some programs are specifically restricted to interdisciplinary research topics. In those programs, a great deal of weight is given to "interdisciplinary" aspects of the proposed work. Some other NSF programs, while not so restricted, explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research and consider it as a positive factor.

In programs that do not distinguish interdisciplinary research as a priority, the review will be based on the combined assessment of the project according to NSF's Merit Review criteria and any other special criteria that may be part of the program's solicitation or description. In these programs, interdisciplinary proposals that advance the program goals are encouraged and funded, and any "weight" is based on the anticipated potential of the project, not whether it is interdisciplinary or single-disciplinary in nature.

Finally, if a proposal is not reviewed through an existing program, it will be reviewed using the two NSF Merit Review criteria: Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts.

3. Has NSF set aside funds for interdisciplinary research proposals?

Collaborations of interdisciplinary teams are encouraged throughout many NSF solicitations. For example, facility and center programs may call for interdisciplinary efforts.

In programs that do not explicitly call for interdisciplinary research, funds are not set aside for such proposals. However, a division, office or directorate may designate funds to support projects with noteworthy characteristics or potential, which could result from an interdisciplinary approach.

4. I discussed my ideas for an interdisciplinary proposal with several program officers but was discouraged to submit. What are my options?

Program officers play a critical role in providing guidance to the community on the various funding opportunities at NSF. You may have been discouraged to submit because your proposal is outside the scope of NSF’s programs and funding opportunities described in the " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide ."

Even if you are discouraged from submitting, you always retain the option to submit a proposal. To submit, you can contact one of the points of contact identified on this page, or you can contact NSF at [email protected] or (703) 292-4840. NSF's points of contact are responsible for finding an appropriate mechanism for reviewing your proposal.

5. Is the merit review process less receptive to interdisciplinary proposals?

No. Funding interdisciplinary research is a high priority for NSF and, in turn, program officers will identify appropriate panelists and ad hoc reviewers to ensure that the full range of interdisciplinary research is covered by a proposal's reviewers.

But it is important to remember that being interdisciplinary does not automatically make a proposal more worthy. Unfortunately, NSF must decline a high percentage of meritorious proposals for a variety of reasons.

NSF's program officers have the responsibility and authority to recommend awards for proposals that were not among the most highly ranked by the review panels in order to maintain a balanced portfolio of investments.

6. If my funded interdisciplinary research project is not successful in achieving its stated goals, will this jeopardize future funding possibilities?

As with any prior NSF award, reviewers are asked to comment on the quality of prior work when evaluating a proposal. Note that your proposal may contain up to five pages to describe those results.

7. May I submit the same interdisciplinary research proposal to more than one program concurrently?

No. As indicated in NSF's " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide ," you are required to select one applicable program announcement, solicitation or program description when preparing your proposal. In some instances, you can also select more than one of NSF's programs or units that you feel are appropriate to co-review your interdisciplinary research project.

Even if you submit your proposal to one program, an NSF program officer may elect to have your proposal reviewed by more than one program.

8. If my interdisciplinary research proposal is reviewed by more than one program, will it be subject to "double jeopardy"?

Preliminary analyses indicate that proposals that are co-reviewed by two or more programs actually have, in most cases, a slightly higher chance of being recommended for funding than do proposals reviewed in a single program.

9. May I add extra pages to the project description because my proposal is interdisciplinary?

No. Your proposal must conform to the " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide " or to the limitations specified in the program solicitation.

10. How will differing program target dates, deadlines or submission windows affect the review of an interdisciplinary proposal that is reviewed by multiple programs?

This may lengthen the review process somewhat if one program's submission cycle differs substantially from another's. The points of contact identified on this site will assure that an appropriate review is carried out, and program officers will work together to conduct these reviews as expeditiously as possible.

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• Published: 22 September 2020

Transdisciplinarity as a discipline and a way of being : complementarities and creative tensions

• Cyrille Rigolot   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8316-0226 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  7 , Article number:  100 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Transdisciplinarity is generally defined by the inclusion of non-academic stakeholders in the process of knowledge production. Transdisciplinarity is a promising notion, but its ability to efficiently address the world’s most pressing issues still requires improvement. Several typologies of transdisciplinarity have been proposed, generally with a theoretical versus practical dichotomy (Mode 1/Mode 2), and effort has focused on possible linkages between different types. However, in the last two decades, transdisciplinarity has significantly matured to the extent that the classical theoretical versus practical distinction appears clearly limited. In this paper, a reframing of the debate is proposed by considering transdisciplinarity as a new discipline and as a way of being . The conception of transdisciplinarity as a discipline can be related to the recent development of the broader discipline of “integration and implementation sciences” (i2S), to which “practical” Mode 2 transdisciplinarity is a major contributor. When transdisciplinarity is considered as a way of being , it is inseparable from personal life and extends far beyond the professional activities of a researcher. To illustrate this conception, the work and life of Edgar Morin can be used as an exemplary reference in conjunction with other streams of thought, such as integral theory. Transdisciplinarity as a discipline and transdisciplinarity as a way of being have complementarities in terms of researchers’ personal dispositions and space for expression in academia. The proposed distinction also raises the question of the status of consciousness in transdisciplinary projects, which may be a fruitful controversial topic for the transdisciplinary research community.

Introduction

In the context of unprecedented worldwide crises, transdisciplinarity is increasingly mentioned as a promising way of producing knowledge and decision-making (Lang et al., 2012 ). Transdisciplinarity is often characterized by the inclusion of non-academic stakeholders in the process of knowledge production (Scholz and Steiner, 2015 ). The notion of transdisciplinarity emerged in the 1970s and developed in different streams that correspond to different communities and contrasting research practices (Klein, 2014 ). Several typologies have been proposed to characterize these different streams and their relationships. In one of the most common typologies, based on the work of Gibbons et al. ( 1994 ) in the sociology of science, Scholz and Steiner ( 2015 ) distinguish two modes of transdisciplinarity: “Mode 1” transdisciplinarity, which is mostly theoretical, is motivated by a general search for a “unity of knowledge” and corresponds to an “inner-science activity”, while “Mode 2” transdisciplinarity, which is mostly practical, is typically characterized by the inclusion of stakeholders in participatory problem-solving approaches that are applied to tangible, real-world problems (Scholz and Steiner, 2015 ). Mode 1 transdisciplinarity is typically associated with the quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu’s proposal of a methodology based on three axioms: (1) levels of reality, (2) the principle of the hidden third, and (3) complexity. These axioms are extensively developed in the literature (Nicolescu, 2010 ; McGregor, 2015a ). In another famous typology, Max-Neef ( 2005 ) proposes distinguishing “weak transdisciplinarity”, which can be applied “following traditional methods and logic”, and “strong transdisciplinarity”, notably inspired by Nicolescu’s work, which is characterized by a specific quantum-like logic and breaks with the assumption of a single reality (Max-Neef, 2005 ). From this perspective, transdisciplinarity is more than a new discipline or a super-discipline; it is “a different manner of seeing the world [that is] more systemic and holistic” (Max-Neef, 2005 ). As a last example, Nicolescu ( 2010 ) distinguishes three forms of transdisciplinary: (1) theoretical (referring to his own work and that of his collaborator, Edgar Morin), (2) phenomenological (corresponding to Gibbon’s Mode 2), and (3) experimental (which is based on existing data in a diversity of fields, such as education, art, and literature).

Transdisciplinarity is often described as a promising notion, but its ability to efficiently address the world’s most pressing issues still requires improvement. Although several transdisciplinary projects with non-academic stakeholders have led to significant improvements in addressing important issues, many other projects have been disappointing as the benefits claimed for participation are often not realized (Frame and Brown, 2008 ). One common response to overcome these limitations is to provide a better link between different types of transdisciplinarity regardless of the typology used. For example, for Scholz and Steiner ( 2015 ), a major challenge for transdisciplinarity is to better link Mode 1 and Mode 2 as a way to maintain high quality standards and to prevent transdisciplinarity from “being increasingly used for labeling any interactions between scientists and practitioners”. For Max-Neef ( 2005 ), efforts are needed to perfect transdisciplinarity as a world vision “until the weak is absorbed and consolidated in the strong”. Nicolescu ( 2010 ) also stresses the need to acknowledge both the diversity and the unity of his three types of transdisciplinarity (theoretical, phenomenological, experimental). In line with these different calls, some approaches have been proposed to better link different types of transdisciplinarity. For example, Rigolot ( 2020 ) suggests that quantum theory can be used as a source of insight to narrow the gap between Mode 1 and Mode 2 transdisciplinarity.

In this paper, another strategy is proposed by reframing the entire debate. Each of the mentioned typologies of transdisciplinarity has important limitations, and the very idea of a typology itself has become limited. As discussed in the next section, the notion of a Mode 1 transdisciplinarity and the related “theoretical” transdisciplinarity in Nicolescu’s terms were somewhat misleading notions from the start. In contrast, Mode 2 transdisciplinarity has evolved considerably in the last two decades, particularly with regard to its openness to shared methods and theories. The hierarchy introduced by Max-Neef ( 2005 ) between weak and strong transdisciplinarity also seems questionable. To move forward, rather than proposing another typology, it might be more fruitful to engage a dialog between transdisciplinarity as a new discipline and as a way of being . The next section presents the emergence and main characteristics of both the discipline and the way of being . Transdisciplinarity as a discipline can be seen as emerging from “Mode 2” transdisciplinarity as a result of a “bottom-up” mutualization of methodologies and theories. As an exemplary illustration, it can be related to the recent stimulating development of “integration and implementation sciences” (i2S) (Bammer, 2017 ; Bammer et al., 2020 ), although the correspondence is not exact (i2S is larger than transdisciplinarity as a discipline). Insights from complex thought (Morin, 2008 ) and integral theory (Wilber, 1995 ; Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ) are used to illustrate transdisciplinarity as a way of being . The third section of this paper presents the complementarities and creative tensions between a transdisciplinary discipline and a way of being before concluding with the added value of the proposed approach.

Mode 2 transdisciplinarity and the discipline of “integration and implementation sciences”

The emergence of a new academic discipline requires a broad research community with a common purpose that collaborates not only on a practical level but also on methodological and theoretical levels. Following this approach, transdisciplinarity as a discipline can be understood in terms of Mode 2 transdisciplinarity and insights from integration and implementation sciences. The notion of Mode 2 transdisciplinarity was adopted in the Zürich congress in 2000 by the major academic transdisciplinarity research community, which ultimately became the Swiss-based TD-net Network for Transdisciplinarity Research (McGregor, 2015a ). The “Zürich approach” discarded the notion of transdisciplinary as a methodology with axioms, as proposed by Nicolescu, which was later labeled “Mode 1” (Scholz and Steiner, 2015 ) or “theoretical” (Nicolescu, 2010 ) transdisciplinarity. According to Klein ( 2014 ), the Zürich congress 2000 was a pivotal event in the evolution of transdisciplinarity discourses. Originally, Mode 2 science was characterized by six principles (Gibbons et al. 1994 ) that would later be used as a basis for an “ideal-type” Mode 2 transdisciplinarity (Scholtz and Steiner, 2015 ): (1) Mode 2 knowledge is produced in the context where it will be applied; (2) it has its own distinct characteristics beyond disciplinary knowledge; (3) Mode 2 is heterogeneous in terms of skills, viewpoints and participants’ experiences; (4) structures are seen as transient and evolving rather than rigidly hierarchical; (5) the resulting knowledge is socially robust and relevant for the actors involved; (6) the quality of the produced knowledge is ensured by adequate criteria and procedures (McGregor, 2015a ). Following the principles of Mode 2, Scholtz and Steiner ( 2015 ) identified a possible “kernel” of transdisciplinary processes, which can be seen as a common purpose for the related community, in “the mutual learning among scientists and practitioners about a complex, societally relevant problem”.

As Mode 2 transdisciplinarity emerged at the expense of the methodology proposed by Nicolescu ( 2010 ), it became characterized by the adjective “practical” by contrast. Because the Zürich approach refused to embrace an overarching methodology (i.e., Nicolescu’s methodology), it became associated with “the refusal to formulate any methodology” (Nicolescu, 2010 ) and, correlatively, with an aversion to theoretical developments. However, recent breakthroughs have led to a move beyond what now appears as an over-simplification, as exemplified by the development of a new discipline of integration and implementation sciences (I2S) (Bammer, 2017 ). Integration and implementation sciences (i2S) does not strictly correspond to transdisciplinarity as it encompasses many other approaches, such as system dynamics, sustainability sciences and action research (Bammer, 2017 ). However, there is a significant overlap, as indicated in the definition of i2S as “a new discipline providing concepts and methods for conducting research on complex, real-world problems” (Bammer, 2017 ). In particular, the domain of application of i2S includes topics such as the synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, the understanding and management of diverse unknowns and the provision of integrated research support for policy and practice change (Bammer, 2017 ). As noted by Bammer ( 2017 ), the development of the i2S discipline was motivated by the difficulty of interdisciplinarity (including transdisciplinarity) in fitting into the mainstream and the fragmentation of methods and academic communities, which led to extensive “reinventing of methods”. A major advance has been to build a methods repository, which is also open to theoretical exchanges and development (Bammer et al., 2020 ). In a post on the i2S blog Footnote 1 presenting discussions held at the 2015 TD-net conference, a group of researchers discuss the role of theory specifically for transdisciplinary research. For this group, “theory makes clear what transdisciplinary researchers value and stand for”, which is why they feel “a responsibility to build and articulate it”. This group also insists on the specificities of transdisciplinarity research and the importance of “holding theory lightly and approaching and using it pragmatically”. While the distance from Nicolescu’s overarching approach clearly remains, such recent reflections unambiguously break with the previous view of a mostly practical transdisciplinarity that is methodology and theory averse.

Transdisciplinarity as a way of being

To date, most academic debates about types of transdisciplinarity have focused on the Mode 2 or Zürich transdisciplinarity approach, on the one hand, and the theoretical work of the quantum physicist Nicolescu ( 2010 ), on the other hand (Scholtz and Steiner, 2015 ; Bernstein, 2015 ; McGregor, 2015a ). Although these debates have yielded stimulating insights regarding, for example, the complementarity of Mode 2 transdisciplinarity with Nicolescu’s axioms, they may have reached a limit. In particular, Nicolescu’s propensity for theoretical developments and his background as a quantum physicist have contributed to the idea of a “theoretical” transdisciplinarity, as he labels it, and even further to a Mode 1 transdisciplinarity, typically associated with the image of the “ivory tower” (Scholtz and Steiner, 2015 ). To move the debate forward, the work of the French philosopher Edgar Morin can be used as a key reference for further exploration. Morin’s work and “complex thought” are widely acknowledged as a major contribution to domains such as philosophy, sociology and biology but, surprisingly, to a lesser degree to transdisciplinarity (compared to Nicolescu). However, Morin is a cosignatory with Nicolescu of the seminal “charter of transdisciplinarity” (Nicolescu et al., 1994 ). Morin himself did not engage in academic debates about transdisciplinarity as Nicolescu did (which is indicative of Morin’s approach to transdisciplinarity as a way of being ). As summarized by Montuori ( 2013 ), “ Morin’s work does not come from an attempt to escape life for an ivory tower (…) but from an effort to immerse himself in it more deeply ”. As several other commentators have noted, Montuori ( 2013 ) shows how Morin’s transdisciplinary work and well-known “complex thought” are deeply integrated with his own life experiences, including events such as the death of his mother and his participation in French resistance, about which Morin constantly reflects in journals and autobiographies. Morin is also deeply engaged in the public and political debate in France. He played a significant role, for example, in the emergence of ecological questions in the public debate (Morin and Kern, 1993 ). For Montuori ( 2013 ), Morin’s transdisciplinary approach “ does not seek to simply solve a problem, but is rather a quest for meaning derived from personal experience ”.

From his own life experiences (such as the lies around his mother’s death when he was a child and his disillusionment with the French communist party), Edgar Morin developed a particularly strong sense of distrust towards self-deception and illusion. He became aware (and then theorized) that every form of knowledge is a construction resulting from specific sources and choices that themselves depend on historical contingencies and personal preferences (Morin, 2008 ). Consequently, transdisciplinarity as a way of being cannot be fairly represented by the biased perception of only one key author, including Edgar Morin. For Gidley ( 2016 ), a diversity of authors and research fields are complementary to Morin’s way of thinking. For example, integral theory shows particularly stimulating complementarities (Gidley, 2016 ; Kelly, 2018 ). In line with the search for a unity of knowledge in Morin’s and Nicolescu’s works (Klein, 2014 ), integral theory is an attempt “to integrate as many approaches, theories and thinkers as possible in a common framework” (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ). On the basis of the philosopher Ken Wilber’s seminal work ( 1995 ), integral theory has been presented as a “theory of everything” that aims to gather “separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching” (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ). Among other authors (e.g., Gidley, 2016 ; Kelly, 2018 ), Sue McGregor ( 2015b ) has identified some strong complementarities between integral theory and transdisciplinarity, for example, with regard to the consideration of different levels of reality. For this author, integral theory can be seen as an “internal life- and world-processing orientation” (McGregor, 2015b ), which precisely corresponds to the broad definition of transdisciplinarity as a way of being adopted in the present paper. A stimulating complementarity between Integral theory and Edgar Morin’s complex thought lies in the integration of spiritual knowledge: whereas integral theory insists that there is some truth everywhere and gives strong credit to religions as holders of truth, Morin is open to spiritual knowledge but is also constantly skeptical (Montuori, 2013 ; Kelly, 2018 ). This skepticism is related to Morin embodied distrust towards self-deception, errors and illusions, which he sees constantly in knowledge production, including in the realm of science (Montuori, 2013 ; Kelly, 2018 ).

Complementarities and creative tensions

Some important characteristics of the i2S discipline were developed by Bammer et al. ( 2020 ) and can be used as a basis for characterizing transdisciplinarity as a discipline (although the i2S discipline is larger) in comparison with transdisciplinarity as a way of being . When transdisciplinarity is seen as a discipline (as part of i2S), it applies to particular issues or “wicked” problems (Bammer et al., 2020 ). More precisely, expertize in integration and implementation is required at different stages of the problem-solving process, from delimiting the problem to accommodating solutions. Bammer et al. ( 2020 ) also identify different realms where expertize can be found, which are related to communities of professional scientists or associated with academic research projects or research domains (such as unknowns and innovation). From the explorations of Bammer et al. ( 2020 ), it appears that the production of specific knowledge for the discipline of integration and implementation sciences occurs primarily in a community of professional scientists. On the other hand, from the perspective of a transdisciplinary way of being , every problem in real life can be framed as complex (Morin, 2008 ). Moreover, the relevant skills, knowledge and know-how to overcome such complex problems have been developed from ancient times and far beyond academia (Wilber, 1995 ). The way of being lens is also useful to make sense of why the first main practical application domain of Morin’s complex thought was education (Morin, 2002 ; Gidley, 2016 ). Transdisciplinarity as a new discipline and transdisciplinarity as a way of being partly overlap. Notably, the transdisciplinary way of being provides relevant “dispositions” to engage in the transdisciplinary discipline (McGregor, 2015b ). For example, participation in the public debate (agora) can be seen both as a possible characteristic of a transdisciplinary way of being (as exemplified by Edgar Morin) and as essential for the contextualization of problems in research projects (McGregor, 2015b ). Reciprocally, a transdisciplinary discipline provides specific skills and a much-needed space for the expression of the transdisciplinary way of being in academia (Ross and Mitchell, 2018 ).

However, tensions may also occur between transdisciplinarity as a discipline and as a way of being . In particular, this distinction raises the question of the status of consciousness in transdisciplinary research projects. In line with the developmental approach of the psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget, who coined the term transdisciplinarity (Nicolescu, 2010 ), a transdisciplinary way of being is embedded in an evolutionary approach to consciousness. A typical expression of Edgar Morin is that “we are at the prehistory of the human mind”, meaning that much of the human mental capacity remains to be explored. To a large extent, Morin’s approach is consistent with the deep exploration of transpersonal psychology by integral scholars (Gidley, 2016 ; Kelly, 2018 ). Transpersonal psychology refers to the integration of the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. The transpersonal is defined as “experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos” (Walsh and Vaughan, 1993 ). Correlative with this conception, in the current context of worldwide unprecedented crisis, the transdisciplinary way of being encourages consideration of ideas such as a whole civilization change (Morin, 2011 ) based on an evolution of human thought or consciousness (Botta, 2019 ). However, many transdisciplinary scholars may hesitate to consider these ideas in the solution space of research projects. In particular, the potential tension is apparent in relation to integral theory, which explicitly and significantly includes spiritual knowledge and often associates an evolution of consciousness with processes of “awakening” (Wilber, 1995 ). Although integral theory is currently used by a large number of transdisciplinary scholars (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ), it may be considered by other transdisciplinary scholars to be non-scientific and misleading. This tension is mostly implicit and seldom discussed in the literature, but it can manifest concretely as part of transdisciplinary research projects. Tension can particularly occur between a search for consensus that integrates and respects diverse stakeholders’ viewpoints as they are and the aim of transforming ways of thinking (including those of scientists themselves). In the first case, transdisciplinarity (as a discipline) is a means by which scientists contribute to problem solving. In the second case, transdisciplinarity (as a way of being ) is also a solution that must be enhanced in society at large.

Transdisciplinarity is a promising notion, but its ability to efficiently address the world’s most pressing issues has been intensively debated. To date, most debates have been structured by identifying several types of transdisciplinarity, generally with a theoretical versus practical dichotomy, and their possible linkages. In the last two decades, important efforts to mutualize methodologies and theories have led to the emergence of a discipline of integration and implementation, which enables the conception of transdisciplinarity as a discipline. Somewhat paradoxically, such a discipline seems to emerge from “Mode 2” transdisciplinarity as a result of a “bottom-up” mutualization rather than from the so-called Mode 1 “inner-science” transdisciplinarity. This distinction shows the interpenetration of Mode 2 and Mode 1 transdisciplinarity and the limits of existing typologies of transdisciplinarity. On the other hand, when transdisciplinarity is taken as a way of being , the need for knowledge and know-how for integration and implementation extends far beyond the scope of research projects and appears constantly and ubiquitously in real life. The relevant resources can be found not only in academia but also in domains such as literature and religion, keeping in mind the constant risks of errors and illusion (including in science itself). Compared to existing typologies, the consideration of transdisciplinarity as a discipline and a way of being could generate new insights in the ongoing debate about the potential and effectiveness of transdisciplinary approaches. Complementarities can be considered in terms of personal dispositions for the discipline and of a space for expression for the way of being in academia. The proposed reframing also sheds light on the status of consciousness in transdisciplinary research projects. In a sense, consciousness can be seen as a critical “unknown” for the activity of integration and implementation and a major topic for further investigation.

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This paper was funded by the French government IDEX-ISITE initiative 16-IDEX-0001 (CAP 20-25). This paper has benefited from discussions with Isabelle Arpin, Cécile Barnaud, Gaël Plumecocq, and INRAE ACT division (Sciences for Action and Transitions).

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Rigolot, C. Transdisciplinarity as a discipline and a way of being : complementarities and creative tensions. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 7 , 100 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00598-5

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Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2012)

Chapter: 3 overview of discipline-based education research.

Overview of Discipline-Based Education Research

As the previous chapters show, discipline-based education research (DBER) is a relatively new area of research composed of a set of loosely affiliated fields with common goals and methods. The fields share some common history, but follow unique trajectories that reflect the characteristics of their parent disciplines. In addition, DBER has close ties to related research on teaching and learning in education and psychology.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the research foci of the fields of DBER and consider their similarities and differences. This overview sets the context for the more detailed synthesis of DBER presented in Chapters 4 through 7 . In the following sections we discuss the substantive focus of research in each field of DBER, typical methods used across the fields of DBER, and the relationship of DBER to broader principles and theories of learning and instruction. The chapter concludes by identifying some key strengths and limitations of DBER as a whole.

SCOPE AND FOCUS

Across the fields of DBER, broad-level learning goals drive instruction and the concomitant research on instruction. The different disciplines of science and engineering continue to clarify goals regarding core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices. Participants in a 2008 workshop series on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education identified the following general learning goals for students, which also are relevant for DBER (National Research Council, 2011):

•   Master a few major concepts well and indepth

•   Retain what is learned over the long term

•   Build a mental framework that serves as a foundation for future learning

•   Develop visualization competence, including the ability to critique, interpret, construct, and connect with physical systems

•   Develop skills (analytic and critical judgment) needed to use scientific information to make informed decisions

•   Understand the nature of science

•   Find satisfaction in engaging in real-world issues that require knowledge of science

The committee acknowledged the difficulty of identifying a common set of learning goals for science education at the undergraduate level because the missions and goals of courses and programs vary widely. Thus, this list does not represent our consensus on learning goals for undergraduate science education. However, as the following discussions of scope reveal, these goals are reflected to some extent across the fields of DBER.

Physics Education Research

The extensive scope of contemporary physics education research has been reviewed by Docktor and Mestre (2011). Over time, the focus of inquiry has expanded from narrow investigations of students’ difficulties in learning specific concepts to reflect the realization that improving physics learning is a complex and multifaceted problem. As a result of this shift, current physics education research addresses the following topics:

•   characterizing students with respect to conceptual knowledge, problem solving, use of representations, attitudes toward physics and toward learning more broadly, knowledge of scientific processes, and knowledge transfer;

•   defining goals for physics instruction based on rates of student learning, needs for future learning, transfer, or population diversity;

•   developing curricular materials and pedagogies to facilitate conceptual change, improve problem-solving skills and the use of representations, improve attitudes toward physics and general learning, or provide experiences with the practices of science;

•   investigating how students and instructors use curricular materials and pedagogies such as textbooks, problems, group work, or electronic feedback;

•   investigating the difficulties of changing instructional paradigms, including the role of instructor beliefs and values, institutional constraints, student expectations, and student backgrounds; and

•   investigating the role of basic thought processes in learning physics.

Chemistry Education Research

In 1991, a groundbreaking article introduced what is now known as “Johnstone’s Triangle” (Johnstone, 1991), which portrays the three central components of chemistry knowledge: the macroscopic, particulate, and symbolic (letters, numbers, and other symbols used to succinctly communicate chemistry knowledge) domains. These three domains have since provided a structure for chemistry education research. Indeed, questions about what students of chemistry know, or how teachers of chemistry ought to teach, mirror the quest of chemists to connect the macroscopic properties (color, smell, taste, solubility, etc.) of matter to the structure and particulate nature of matter.

Current areas of interest in chemistry education include

•   students’ conceptual understanding, especially of the particulate nature of matter (see Chapter 4 );

•   the use of technology to shape student reasoning;

•   analysis of student argumentation patterns;

•   the use of heuristics in student reasoning; and

•   the development of assessment tools to measure thinking about chemistry (see Chapter 7 ).

Engineering Education Research

Guided by the ABET accreditation criteria (ABET, 2009) and their implementation, the principal areas of inquiry for engineering education research include the following:

•   the extent to which engineering education reflects engineering approaches by integrating and aligning content, assessment, and pedagogy for learning module, course, and program design (the equivalent of developing requirements or specifications, assigning relevant metrics, and preparing prototypes that meet the requirements) and by engaging in a cycle of improvement that closes the loop between research and practice;

•   the extent to which engineering faculty adopt evidence-based practices;

•   the extent to which faculty take a scholarly approach to teaching and learning or envision a developmental process for learning and inquiry;

•   the extent of collaboration with higher education researchers, learning scientists, and other scholars of teaching and learning;

•   the implicit and explicit values that departmental, college, and university cultures place on teaching and learning compared with traditional disciplinary research;

•   the balance that Ph.D. programs strike between disciplinary research and the development of teaching and learning knowledge and skills;

•   how engineers understand the nature of engineering work, especially early in their careers, but also across the career span; and

•   strategies for helping students develop an understanding of what it means to be, and to become, an engineer.

As discussed in Chapter 2 , these areas of inquiry and the ABET-defined areas of knowledge and skill development for engineering students have provided a framework for engineering education research since the late 1990s. One particular area of emphasis has been students’ understanding of engineering concepts (Svinicki, 2011), with a concomitant focus on methods to promote greater conceptual understanding. Engineering education research also investigates methods for improving students’ problem-solving and design skills.

Engineers pursue solutions to problems or improvements in the current state of the art, and engineering education researchers do the same. In aeronautical engineering courses, for example, prototypes such as sailplanes are used to demonstrate conceptual understanding, higher order thinking skills, and other dimensions of learning (Hansen, Long, and Dellert, 2002). However, these outcomes are not the focus of the research per se . Instead, engineering education research in this instance attends to how well the curriculum and instruction prepares students to understand the complexities of aeronautical engineering. The goal of preparing students for the future also highlights the importance of translating skills learned in the classroom to the workplace, which is another concern of engineering education research.

Some skills that are emphasized in ABET—teamwork, communication, and ethics/professionalism—are important in the engineering workplace, but have received relatively little attention from the engineering education research community. The awareness skills identified by ABET (appreciation for the impact of engineering on society locally and globally, commitment to lifelong learning, knowledge of contemporary issues) have received similarly little research attention.

Biology Education Research

Since the mid-1990s, biology education research has followed the lead of physics education research by identifying students’ conceptual understanding, building concept inventories, and assessing the effects of instructional interventions such as increased classroom engagement and group problem solving on students’ learning (Dirks, 2011). Biology is a quantitative science, yet many students with math phobia enroll in biology, rather than other science courses, either to fulfill general education distributions or as a major. Thus, a current challenge for biology education researchers is to identify instructional approaches that can help overcome the math phobia of many biology students and introduce more quantitative skills into the introductory curriculum, as computational biology and other mathematical approaches become more central to the field of biology (National Research Council, 2003).

Geoscience Education Research

Defining the scope of geoscience education research presents a challenge because there is no central “canon” of knowledge that is encompassed by the disciplines that study the earth (geology, oceanography, geophysics, geochemistry, atmospheric science, meteorology, climatology, planetary science, and physical geography). Geoscience content may be taught in a variety of courses, in different departments.

In the balance between implementing research findings to improve educational practice and accruing more such findings, geoscience education research has, to date, heavily emphasized the former. However, following other fields of DBER, geoscience education research built its first body of research around students’ understanding of basic topics. These topics include the seasons, land forms, geological time, and natural hazards (Dahl, Anderson, and Libarkin, 2005; DeLaughter, Stein, and Bain, 1998; Kusnick, 2002; Libarkin, Kurdziel, and Anderson, 2007; Shepardon et al., 2007). Current areas of active inquiry include spatial thinking, temporal thinking, systems thinking, and field-based teaching and learning (Kastens, Agrawal, and Liben, 2009). In spatial thinking (Liben and Titus, 2012), geoscience education research finds common ground with geography education research (National Research Council, 2006), and in systems thinking (Stillings, 2012) with biology education research. Temporal thinking (Cervato and Frodeman, 2012; Dodick and Orion, 2006) and field-based learning (Maskall and Stokes, 2008; Mogk and Goodwin, 2012) appear at present to be distinctive to geoscience education research, with some parallel work in biology education research. Research on climate change education is an emerging interdisciplinary field (Gautier, Deutsch, and Rebich, 2006;

Marx et al., 2007; Mohan, Chen, and Anderson, 2009; Rebich and Gautier, 2005; Sterman and Sweeney, 2007; Weber, 2006), and an interesting example of the interplay between DBER and societal challenges.

Astronomy Education Research

To date, astronomy education research has predominantly identified students’ conceptual understanding. Another prominent focus of early research in astronomy education has been to address questions of overall teaching effectiveness (Bailey, 2011).

The methods DBER scholars use are as diverse as the research questions they investigate. Depending on the focus of the research, these methods range from qualitative interview studies or classroom observations of a few or dozens of students, to quasi-experimental comparisons of the learning of hundreds of students in similar courses across multiple institutions, to experimental manipulations in a research setting.

In some cases, the methods used by DBER scholars reflect the influence of the parent discipline. For example, astronomy is a quantitative science conducted by scholars with formal training in quantitative scientific methods, and the early history of astronomy education research was similarly dominated by quantitative research. Only recently has astronomy education begun to address questions similar to those pursued in the behavioral and social sciences, including questions that are best answered with qualitative methods (Bailey, Slater, and Slater, 2010). This trajectory of methodological approaches is similar to physics education research, and the trend to include a more robust combination of quantitative and qualitative studies is evidence that astronomy education research is maturing. Biology education research is another DBER field that is newly emerging from a quantitative discipline. As a result, the preponderance of biology education research is quantitative, and includes a relatively strong emphasis on quasi-experimental studies. In contrast, while experimental design is the norm in chemistry, chemistry education research has a long history of incorporating a wider range of qualitative and quantitative methods than are typically used in the parent discipline.

Research Settings and Study Populations

Across the disciplines in this study, DBER scholars have studied similar types of courses. Despite the overall similarity of courses studied, however, not all institutions or student populations are equivalent in terms of class

size, social background, and institutional priorities. These variations can have profound effects on outcomes and are important to consider when assessing the inferences that can be made from DBER findings.

Research Settings

Large introductory courses are the primary setting for research in all DBER fields because these courses reach the most students. Research on student learning in these courses is often spurred by and related to the traditional overemphasis on memorization of factual information in a discipline, with an accompanying lack of student interest, shallow conceptual understanding, and poor retention (Sundberg, Dini, and Li, 1994).

Despite the prevalence of laboratory courses in the sciences and engineering and despite the importance of fieldwork in biology and the geosciences, very little DBER has been conducted in those settings. Moreover, relatively little research has been conducted in graduate or advanced-level undergraduate courses. Most of the latter comes from physics (e.g., Baily and Finkelstein, 2011; Pollock et al., 2011; Smith, Thompson, and Mountcastle, 2010) and chemistry (Bhattacharyya and Bodner, 2005; Orgill and Bodner, 2006; Sandi-Urena et al., 2011).

Some DBER has been conducted in the K-12 setting. Early research on learning and teaching chemistry, for example, investigated K-12 students because it was conducted by faculty who supervised preservice teacher training. Over time, chemistry education research came to include postsecondary students as faculty who taught introductory courses in chemistry departments began conducting research on those courses.

Conducting and interpreting research in introductory courses poses a number of challenges. A particular challenge in introductory biology courses is the breadth of the various divergent biology subfields, which further encourages broad, shallow introductory surveys of the discipline and hampers development of conceptual assessments that measure general biological knowledge across subfields of biology. In addition, the different subfields rely to some extent on different methodologies, for example the observational field work in ecology and the experimental laboratory research of molecular biology.

In contrast, astronomy education research has been motivated largely by a desire to improve teaching and learning in a single undergraduate course: the general education, introductory, nonmathematically oriented astronomy survey course known colloquially as ASTRO 101. The challenges of conducting research on ASTRO 101 and introductory geoscience courses are similar. In both disciplines, introductory courses typically include students who have little or no background in the subject and who usually are not considering careers in the discipline; undergraduates in

ASTRO 101 are most often future teachers or nonscience majors. Thus, faculty members are compelled to make these courses attractive, accessible and relevant to recruit and retain majors to the discipline, which means that the goals for these courses are often diffuse and broad. Moreover, ASTRO 101 is “terminal” in nature, rarely serving as a prerequisite for upper level courses. Because of these factors, introductory courses in the geosciences and astronomy can vary widely within and across institutions, posing a challenge for developing a coherent body of research on learning in these courses.

Study Populations

Given the focus of DBER on introductory courses, most studies include a mix of majors and nonmajors. Even in studies that investigate the conceptual understanding of individual students rather than the effectiveness of instruction as a whole, study participants typically are drawn from the enrollment in an introductory course. Majors and nonmajors in an introductory course can differ along many dimensions, including their motivations for taking the course, the extent to which they consider the course to be relevant to their studies and their futures, and their goals for learning and achievement. DBER studies do not always measure or explain these factors, which could play a role in learning. Further, as the following chapters show, very little DBER analyzes issues of teaching and learning as they relate to any different subpopulations of students. Although these limitations to the applicability of findings are not always explicitly acknowledged in DBER studies, they should be considered when drawing inferences from the research.

THE ROLE OF LEARNING THEORIES AND PRINCIPLES

The extent to which DBER is grounded in broader theories and principles of learning and teaching varies widely. Many DBER studies either do not situate themselves in a broader theoretical frame, or do not explicitly define that frame. However, whether stated implicitly or explicitly, across the disciplines DBER is heavily influenced by constructivist ideas of learning, which propose that students generate understanding and meaning through experience (Ausubel, 2000; Dewey, 1916). Some DBER studies on collaborative learning are also influenced to varying degrees by socio-cultural learning perspectives, which argue that students generate meaning and understanding by interacting in groups that share a common interest and learn together (Lave and Wenger, 1991), or through cognitive apprenticeships, where experts make tacit processes more explicit for novices

(Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989). The extent to which DBER studies use these perspectives to explain or extend their findings typically is limited.

The different fields of DBER approach the role of theory differently. Physics education research has strong ties to cognitive science research (Docktor and Mestre, 2011). Indeed, many cognitive science studies have investigated problem solving and the use of representations in physics, typically examining students’ cognitive processing principles and internal mental processes (Bassok and Novick, 2012).

As with chemistry more broadly, the symbiosis of theory and measurement shape chemistry education research. The role of theory in experiment design is central to chemistry—data either support or refute theory—and theory plays a similarly important role in chemistry education research. Several resources have been published detailing how learning theory (Bretz and Nakhleh, 2001), methodologies (Orgill and Bodner, 2007), and experimental design in chemistry education research (Sanger, 2008; Towns, 2008) are grounded in the intersection of chemistry with several other disciplines.

In engineering, the Foundation Coalition, with funding from the National Science Foundation, undertook one of the few efforts to tie the ABET accreditation criteria to cognitive theories of learning. These efforts were designed to make the ABET criteria actionable and ground them in broader research. The coalition used Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains to develop a conceptual map linking ABET student learning criteria with learning objectives in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains; assessments of those objectives; theories of cognition; and instructional approaches (see McGourty, Scoles, and Thorpe, 2002).

As discussed in Chapter 1 , and as is evident from the synthesis in Chapters 4 through 7 , DBER overlaps conceptually and theoretically with science education, educational psychology, cognitive science, and educational evaluation. More explicitly situating DBER in learning theories and principles from these fields would help to advance the conversations about teaching and learning in a given discipline, and in science and engineering more broadly. These principles and theories could explain some DBER findings, extend others, and form the foundations for deeper study.

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS

As with all research, DBER has strengths and limitations. DBER’s greatest strength is its contribution of deep disciplinary knowledge to questions of teaching and learning. This knowledge has the potential to guide research that is focused on the most important concepts in a discipline, and offers a framework for interpreting findings about students’ learning and understanding in a discipline. In these ways, even as an emerging field of

inquiry, DBER has deepened the collective understanding of undergraduate learning in the sciences and engineering. When explicitly leveraged, the overlap of DBER with research from K-12 science education, educational psychology, and cognitive science can highlight findings that appear to be robust across different disciplines and learning contexts, and can help to identify differences that merit further exploration.

As described in Chapter 1 , two of the long-term goals of DBER are to understand how people learn the concepts, practices, and ways of thinking of science and engineering and to help identify approaches to make science and engineering education broad and inclusive. Meeting these goals begins with an understanding of similarities and differences among different groups of students, yet very little DBER focuses on different sub-populations of students. At a time when the undergraduate population is becoming increasingly socially, economically, and ethnically diverse, a rich opportunity exists to enhance the understanding of the learning experiences of different groups. In a related vein, DBER could paint a more complete picture of undergraduate learning by taking into account differences among majors and nonmajors in introductory courses and structural differences among introductory courses, service courses for majors in other disciplines, and courses for majors.

At this point, DBER faces some challenges to the goal of independent reproducibility of research findings. Many DBER findings have been generated by the faculty members who are implementing the innovations and who developed the instruments to assess those innovations. The potential for investigator bias exists in these cases because these scholars naturally have a vested interest in the research results. One approach to counter this bias is to study other instructors who are implementing the innovation in question. However, it can be difficult to recruit others to teach specific course content in specific ways, independently of the research team.

Similar to other education research, the scale of most DBER studies poses a challenge to generalizing results, and to translating research findings into practice. A considerable proportion of DBER has been conducted at the scale of a single course, using instruments developed to assess learning in that course. As described elsewhere in this chapter, the variation in introductory courses across a discipline poses challenges to studying learning across those courses. Moreover, to the extent that the studies rely on instruments designed to measure student learning in the context of a single course, they might reflect standard examinations for that course. Such instruments generate little insight into broader issues of student learning, and limit the extent to which findings are applicable to other settings.

DBER has made some progress in addressing these challenges. For example, in the more established fields of DBER, such as physics and chemistry, scholars are developing instruments that can be widely used to generate deeper insights into students’ understanding and learning experiences. And although multi-institutional studies are not the norm in DBER, they do exist. Part II of this report highlights these developments by describing the nature and quality of the existing evidence from discipline-based education research in physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, the geosciences, and astronomy, and synthesizing those literatures.

ORGANIZATION OF THE SYNTHESIS

Across the next three chapters, we examine the literature on undergraduate students’ conceptual understanding ( Chapter 4 ), problem solving and use of representations ( Chapter 5 ), and instructional strategies to improve science and engineering learning ( Chapter 6 ). We devote a subsequent chapter ( Chapter 7 ) to several emerging topics for DBER: science and engineering practices, applying knowledge in different settings (transfer), metacognition, and students’ dispositions and motivations to study science and engineering (the affective domain).

Many of the topics in these chapters have been extensively studied in cognitive science, psychology, and science education. Our synthesis draws on relevant theoretical frameworks and findings from those disciplines to explain, extend, and contextualize DBER, while highlighting DBER’s unique contribution of deep disciplinary knowledge to the understanding of these topics.

In reading Chapters 4 through 7 , it is important to keep in mind that the nature of engineering and engineering education, combined with the strong influence of the ABET accreditation criteria on engineering education research, distinguish engineering education research from the other disciplines in this study. As a result, the body of engineering education research does not fit neatly into the categories around which we have organized the synthesis of the literature. As one example, because engineering education research emphasizes the integration and alignment of content (or curriculum), assessment, and pedagogy, it is difficult to identify studies in engineering that examine the efficacy of specific instructional strategies—the main focus of Chapter 6 . We have parsed the engineering education research to fit the organization of this report, and Table 3-1 maps the ABET criteria onto the major sections of Chapters 4 through 7 . Because the research base did not support a discussion of all ABET criteria, the report only discusses the criteria for which there are relevant, peer-reviewed studies.

TABLE 3-1 Mapping ABET Student Learning Criteria onto Major Sections of the DBER Synthesis

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding.

Discipline-Based Education Research is based on a 30-month study built on two workshops held in 2008 to explore evidence on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This book asks questions that are essential to advancing DBER and broadening its impact on undergraduate science teaching and learning. The book provides empirical research on undergraduate teaching and learning in the sciences, explores the extent to which this research currently influences undergraduate instruction, and identifies the intellectual and material resources required to further develop DBER.

Discipline-Based Education Research provides guidance for future DBER research. In addition, the findings and recommendations of this report may invite, if not assist, post-secondary institutions to increase interest and research activity in DBER and improve its quality and usefulness across all natural science disciples, as well as guide instruction and assessment across natural science courses to improve student learning. The book brings greater focus to issues of student attrition in the natural sciences that are related to the quality of instruction. Discipline-Based Education Research will be of interest to educators, policy makers, researchers, scholars, decision makers in universities, government agencies, curriculum developers, research sponsors, and education advocacy groups.

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Part 1: Thinking Through the Disciplines

Exploring academic disciplines.

Most college writing has some basic features in common: a sense of ethical responsibility and the use of credible and credited sources, critical thinking, and sound argumentation. In addition to these common features, each academic discipline, over many generations, has developed its own specific methods of asking questions and sharing answers. This chapter will show you how to use the lenses of various academic disciplines to develop your writing, reading, and thinking.

3.1 Exploring Academic Disciplines

Learning objectives.

• Survey the landscape of academic disciplines.
• Appreciate how academic disciplines help shape how we understand the world.
• Understand that academic disciplines are constantly in flux, negotiating the terms, conditions, and standards of inquiry, attribution, and evidence.

The following table shows one version of the main academic disciplines and some of their branches.

Since the makeup of the different branches is always in flux and since the history of any institution of higher education is complicated, you will likely find some overlapping and varying arrangements of disciplines at your college.

Part of your transition into higher education involves being aware that each discipline is a distinct discourse community with specific vocabularies, styles, and modes of communication. Later in your college career, you will begin your writing apprenticeship in a specific discipline by studying the formats of published articles within it. You will look for the following formal aspects of articles within that discipline and plan to emulate them in your work:

• Title format
• Introduction
• Overall organization
• Tone (especially level of formality)
• Person (first, second, or third person)
• Voice (active or passive)
• Sections and subheads
• Use of images (photos, tables, graphics, graphs, etc.)
• Discipline-specific vocabulary
• Types of sources cited
• Use of source information
• Documentation style (American Psychological Association, Modern Language Association, Chicago, Council of Science Editors, and so on; for more on this, see Chapter 22 “Appendix B: A Guide to Research and Documentation” )
• Intended audience
• Published format (print or online)

Different disciplines tend to recommend collecting different types of evidence from research sources. For example, biologists are typically required to do laboratory research; art historians often use details from a mix of primary and secondary sources (works of art and art criticism, respectively); social scientists are likely to gather data from a variety of research study reports and direct ethnographic observation, interviews, and fieldwork; and a political scientist uses demographic data from government surveys and opinion polls along with direct quotations from political candidates and party platforms.

Consider the following circle of professors. They are all asking their students to conduct research in a variety of ways using a variety of sources.

What’s required to complete a basic, introductory essay might essentially be the same across all disciplines, but some types of assignments require discipline-specific organizational features. For example, in business disciplines, documents such as résumés, memos, and product descriptions require a specialized organization. Science and engineering students follow specific conventions as they write lab reports and keep notebooks that include their drawings and results of their experiments. Students in the social sciences and the humanities often use specialized formatting to develop research papers, literature reviews, and book reviews.

Part of your apprenticeship will involve understanding the conventions of a discipline’s key genres. If you are reading or writing texts in the social sciences, for example, you will notice a meticulous emphasis on the specifics of methodology (especially key concepts surrounding the collection of data, such as reliability, validity, sample size, and variables) and a careful presentation of results and their significance. Laboratory reports in the natural and applied sciences emphasize a careful statement of the hypothesis and prediction of the experiment. They also take special care to account for the role of the observer and the nature of the measurements used in the investigation to ensure that it is replicable. An essay in the humanities on a piece of literature might spend more time setting a theoretical foundation for its interpretation, it might also more readily draw from a variety of other disciplines, and it might present its “findings” more as questions than as answers. As you are taking a variety of introductory college courses, try to familiarize yourself with the jargon of each discipline you encounter, paying attention to its specialized vocabulary and terminology. It might even help you make a list of terms in your notes.

Scholars also tend to ask discipline-related kinds of questions. For example, the question of “renewable energy” might be a research topic within different disciplines. The following list shows the types of questions that would accommodate the different disciplines:

• Business (economics): Which renewable resources offer economically feasible solutions to energy issues?
• Humanities (history): At what point did humans switch from the use of renewable resources to nonrenewable resources?
• Natural and applied sciences (engineering): How can algae be developed at a pace and in the quantities needed to be a viable main renewable resource?
• Social sciences (geography): Which US states are best suited to being key providers of renewable natural resources?

Key Takeaways

• Most academic disciplines have developed over many generations. Even though these disciplines are constantly in flux, they observe certain standards for investigation, proof, and documentation of evidence.
• To meet the demands of writing and thinking in a certain discipline, you need to learn its conventions.
• An important aspect of being successful in college (and life) involves being aware of what academic disciplines (and professions and occupations) have in common and how they differ.

Think about your entire course load this semester as a collection of disciplines. For each course you are taking, answer the following questions, checking your textbooks and other course materials and consulting with your instructors, if necessary:

• What kinds of questions does this discipline ask?
• What kinds of controversies exist in this discipline?
• How does this discipline share the knowledge it constructs?
• How do writers in this discipline demonstrate their credibility?

After you’ve asked and answered these questions about each discipline in isolation, consider what underlying things your courses have in common, even if they approach the world very differently on the surface.

Based on the example at the end of this section, pick a topic that multiple disciplines study. Formulate four questions about the topic, one from each of any four different disciplines. Ideally choose a topic that might come up in four courses you are currently taking or have recently taken, or choose a topic of particular interest to you. Here are just a few examples to get you started:

• Child abuse
• Poverty in developing nations
• Women in the workforce
• Drawing from the synopses of current research on the Arts and Letters Daily website (see the Note 2.5 “Gallery of Web-Based Texts” in Chapter 2 “Becoming a Critical Reader” ), read the article referenced on a topic or theme of interest to you. Discuss how the author’s discipline affects the way the topic or theme is presented (specifically, the standards of inquiry and evidence).

3.2 Seeing and Making Connections across Disciplines

• Learn how to look for connections between the courses you are taking in different disciplines.
• Witness how topics and issues are connected across disciplines, even when they are expressed differently.
• Understand how to use disciplines to apply past knowledge to new situations.

Section 3.1 “Exploring Academic Disciplines” focused on the formal differences among various academic disciplines and their discourse communities. This section will explore the intellectual processes and concepts disciplines share in common. Even though you will eventually enter a discipline as an academic specialization (major) and as a career path (profession), the first couple of years of college may well be the best opportunity you will ever have to discover how disciplines are connected.

That process may be a re discovery, given that in the early grades (K–5), you were probably educated by one primary teacher each year covering a set of subjects in a single room. Even though you likely covered each subject in turn, that elementary school classroom was much more conducive to making connections across disciplines than your middle school or high school environment. If you’ve been educated in public schools during the recent era of rigid standardization and multiple-choice testing conducted in the name of “accountability,” the disciplines may seem more separate from one another in your mind than they actually are. In some ways, the first two years of your college experience are a chance to recapture the connections across disciplines you probably made naturally in preschool and the elementary grades, if only at a basic level at the time.

In truth, all disciplines are strikingly similar. Together, they are the primary reason for the survival and evolution of our species. As humans, we have designed disciplines, over time, to help us understand our world better. New knowledge about the world is typically produced when a practitioner builds on a previous body of work in the discipline, most often by advancing it only slightly but significantly. We use academic and professional disciplines to conduct persistent, often unresolved conversations with one another.

Most colleges insist on a “core curriculum” to make sure you have the chance to be exposed to each major discipline at least once before you specialize and concentrate on one in particular. The signature “Aha!” moments of your intellectual journey in college will come every time you grasp a concept or a process in one course that reminds you of something you learned in another course entirely. Ironically the more of those “Aha!” moments you have in the first two years of college, the better you’ll be at your specialization because you’ll have that much more perspective about how the world around you fits together.

How can you learn to make those “Aha!” moments happen on purpose? In each course you take, instead of focusing merely on memorizing content for the purposes of passing an exam or writing an essay that regurgitates your professor’s lecture notes, learn to look for the key questions and controversies that animate the discipline and energize the professions in it. If you organize your understanding of a discipline around such questions and controversies, the details will make more sense to you, and you will find them easier to master.

• Disciplines build on themselves, applying past knowledge to new situations and phenomena in a constant effort to improve understanding of the specific field of study.
• Different disciplines often look at the same facts in different ways, leading to wholly different discoveries and insights.
• Disciplines derive their energy from persistent and open debate about the key questions and controversies that animate them.
• Arrange at least one interview with at least one of your instructors, a graduate student, or a working professional in a discipline in which you are interested in studying or pursuing as a career. Ask your interviewee(s) to list and describe three of the most persistent controversies, questions, and debates in the field. After absorbing the response(s), write up a report in your own words about the discipline’s great questions.
• Using a textbook or materials from another course you are taking, describe a contemporary controversy surrounding the ways a discipline asks questions or shares evidence and a historical controversy that appears to have been resolved.
• Using one of your library’s disciplinary databases or the Note 2.5 “Gallery of Web-Based Texts” in Chapter 2 “Becoming a Critical Reader” , find a document that is at least fifty years old operating in a certain discipline, perhaps a branch of science, history, international diplomacy, political science, law, or medicine. The Smithsonian Institution or Avalon Project websites are excellent places to start your search. Knowing what you know about the current conventions and characteristics of the discipline through which this document was produced, how does its use of the discipline differ from the present day? How did the standards of the discipline change in the interim to make the document you’ve found seem so different? Have those standards improved or declined, in your opinion?

3.3 Articulating Multiple Sides of an Issue

• Explore how to recognize binary oppositions in various disciplines.
• Learn the value of entertaining two contradictory but plausible positions as part of your thinking, reading, and writing processes.
• Appreciate the productive, constructive benefits of using disciplinary lenses and borrowing from other disciplines.

Regardless of the discipline you choose to pursue, you will be arriving as an apprentice in the middle of an ongoing conversation. Disciplines have complicated histories you can’t be expected to master overnight. But learning to recognize the long-standing binary oppositions in individual disciplines can help you make sense of the specific issues, themes, topics, and controversies you will encounter as a student and as a professional. Here are some very broadly stated examples of those binary oppositions.

These binary oppositions move freely from one discipline to another, often becoming more complicated as they do so. Consider a couple of examples:

• The binary opposition in the natural and applied sciences between empiricism (the so-called scientific method) and rationalism (using pure reason to speculate about one’s surroundings) originated as a debate in philosophy, a branch of the humanities . In the social sciences , in recent years, empirical data about brain functions in neuroscience have challenged rationalistic theories in psychology. Even disciplines in business are using increasingly empirical methods to study how markets work, as rationalist economic theories of human behavior increasingly come under question.
• The binary opposition between text and context in the humanities is borrowed from the social sciences . Instead of viewing texts as self-contained creations, scholars and artists in the humanities began to appreciate and foreground the cultural influences that helped shape those texts. Borrowings from business disciplines, such as economics and marketing, furthered the notion of a literary and artistic “marketplace,” while borrowings from the natural and applied sciences helped humanists examine more closely the relationship between the observer (whether the critic or the artist) and the subject (the text).

Of course, these two brief summaries vastly oversimplify the evolution of multiple disciplines over generations of intellectual history. Like the chart of binary oppositions, they’re meant merely to inspire you at this point to begin to note the connections between disciplines. Learning to think, write, and function in interdisciplinary ways requires practice that begins at the level of close reading and gradually expands into the way you interact with your surroundings as a college student and working professional.

For a model of how to read and think through the disciplines, let’s draw on a short but very famous piece of writing (available through the Avalon Project in the Note 2.5 “Gallery of Web-Based Texts” ), Abraham Lincoln’s “Address at the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery,” composed and delivered in November of 1863, several months after one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War.

• A military historian (red passages) might focus on Lincoln’s rhetorical technique of using the field of a previous battle in an ongoing war (in this case a victory that nonetheless cost a great deal of casualties on both sides) as inspiration for a renewed, redoubled effort.
• A social psychologist (blue passages) might focus on how Lincoln uses this historical moment of unprecedented national trauma as an occasion for shared grief and shared sacrifice, largely through using the rhetorical technique of an extended metaphor of “conceiving and dedicating” a nation/child whose survival is at stake.
• A political scientist (green passages) might focus on how Lincoln uses the occasion as a rhetorical opportunity to emphasize that the purpose of this grisly and grim war is to preserve the ideals of the founders of the American republic (and perhaps even move them forward through the new language of the final sentence: “of the people, by the people, for the people”).

Notice that each reader, regardless of academic background, needs a solid understanding of how rhetoric works (something we’ll cover in Chapter 4 “Joining the Conversation” in more detail). Each reader has been trained to use a specific disciplinary lens that causes certain passages to rise to prominence and certain insights to emerge.

But the real power of disciplines comes when these readers and their readings interact with each other. Imagine how a military historian could use social psychology to enrich an understanding of how a civilian population was motivated to support a war effort. Imagine how a political scientist could use military history to show how a peacetime, postwar governmental policy can trade on the outcome of a battle. Imagine how a social psychologist could use political science to uncover how a traumatized social structure can begin to heal itself through an embrace of shared governance.

As Lincoln would say, “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”

• Disciplines have long-standing binary oppositions that help shape the terms of inquiry.
• To think, read, and write in a given discipline, you must learn to uncover binary oppositions in the texts, objects, and phenomena you are examining.
• Binary oppositions gain power and complexity when they are applied to multiple disciplines.
• Following the Gettysburg Address example at the end of this section, use three disciplinary lenses to color-code a reading of your choice from the Note 2.5 “Gallery of Web-Based Texts” in Chapter 2 “Becoming a Critical Reader” .
• Find a passage in one of the textbooks you’re using in another course (or look over your lecture notes from another course) where the main discipline appears to be borrowing theories, concepts, or binary oppositions from other disciplines in order to produce new insights and discoveries.
• Individually or with a partner, set up an imaginary two-person dialogue of at least twenty lines (or two pages) that expresses two sides of a contemporary issue with equal force and weight. You may use real people if you want, either from your reading of specific columnists at Arts and Letters Daily or of the essayists at the Big Questions Essay Series (see the Note 2.5 “Gallery of Web-Based Texts” in Chapter 2 “Becoming a Critical Reader” ). In a separate memo, indicate which side you lean toward personally and discuss any difficulty you had with the role playing required by this exercise.
• Show how one of the binary oppositions mentioned in this section is expressed by two writers in a discipline of your choosing. Alternatively, you can come up with a binary opposition of your own, backing it up with examples from the two extremes.
• Briefly describe how an insight or discovery applied past disciplinary knowledge to a new situation or challenge. How might you begin to think about addressing one of the contemporary problems in your chosen discipline?
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The Difference Between Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, and Convergence Research

Multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and convergence research are some of the most predominate research approaches requested by funding opportunities. The terms can seem interchangeable because of their vague and similar definitions. However, the approaches do have subtle differences that are important when it comes to responding to funding opportunities.  

Multidisciplinary research takes place when faculty from different disciplines work independently on a common problem or research question. In this approach, faculty share research goals and work on the same problem, but look at it from their own discipline’s perspective. The findings from each discipline are supplementary to each other. The advantage to multidisciplinary research is that each aspect can be analyzed by a particular specialty, which is often necessary to answer complex research problems.

There are times when research needs things to go a step farther than multiple disciplines each looking at a problem through their own lens – that is when interdisciplinary research happens. 

A National Academies report titled Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research , defines interdisciplinary research as, “a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.” In other words, rather than working independently, with interdisciplinary research disciplines interact and work collaboratively. 

Interdisciplinary research relies on shared knowledge. When this happens, a fundamental shift can take place over time and a new interdisciplinary field emerges. For example, biochemistry, nanoscience, and neuroscience all emerged as interdisciplinary fields that eventually grew to become their own disciplines. 

Recently, another term – convergence research – is at the forefront of research opportunities coming out of a number of federal agencies. For instance, the National Science Foundation (NSF) named Growing Convergence Research as one of their 10 Big Ideas. 

When defined, convergence research has similarities with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. Like interdisciplinary research, convergence research involves integrating disciplines and shifting thought processes, but convergence research takes things even further. In the National Academies report Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering and Beyond , convergence research is explained as “a comprehensive synthetic framework for tackling scientific and societal challenges that exist at the interfaces of multiple fields. By merging these diverse areas of expertise in a network of partnerships, convergence stimulates innovation from basic science discovery to translational application.” 

A convergence approach to research integrates insights and approaches from what have historically been distinct scientific and technological disciplines. At its core, two things are necessary in convergence research: 1) It must be deeply collaborative, involving a deep integration of disciplines; and 2) It results in a positive societal impact. 

With small but distinct differences, it may be helpful to think of these three approaches to research as stepping stones that build upon one another. Multidisciplinary research is the building block of both interdisciplinary and convergence research. Likewise, interdisciplinary research has led to convergence research, which goes beyond the integration of disciplines to bring together disciplines that have not historically worked together and adding the component of societal impact. As research approaches evolve, it is likely that in another decade it will be said that convergence research is a stepping stone to the next approach being pursued by researchers and funding agencies.

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Ecology is not a dirty word

What is a research discipline we need collaboration, not segregation.

I’ve read two new papers this week that got me thinking about how and why we define ourselves as researchers.

One was this excellent paper led by Brian McGill on why macroecology and macroevolution, once essentially part of a single discipline, need to reconverge as they both have complementary goals. As the authors note, macroecology tends to focus on spatial processes, while macroevolution tends to focus on temporal processes. In reality, both types of processes are linked across scales and influence each other. To address fundamental questions about biodiversity and ecosystem function, we need to consider both together.

This segregation across related disciplines is a real problem that we need to address – we’ve seen it with agricultural science and ecology , freshwater & terrestrial ecology and more…

McGill et al. describe how (macro)ecology & (macro)evolution diverged, explain why they need to get back together, and present some pressing research questions as a path forward. It’s a really good paper and I highly recommend it if you work even remotely close to these disciplines.

The second was this paper led by Rogier Hintzen , which I found underwhelming. From my reading, I felt that its aim was to drive a wedge between ecology and conservation biology, which are both closely-related disciplines with common goals. The language throughout the paper is overtly condescending, and consistently implies that ecology is a less relevant discipline to solve today’s environmental problems, compared to conservation biology.

Disclaimer: I’m an ecologist and I work on conservation-relevant problems. I’m here because I care about nature. Sounds trite, but I think that’s what most ecologists are here for.

And as far as I know, there is no pressing knowledge gap that requires a delineation between ecology and conservation biology. But this is the authors’ hypothesis:

“We hypothesize that ecology’s role in conservation biology has waned and that the vision of a science that applies the latest ecological ideas to solving its pressing problems has faded too.”

‘Waned’ and ‘faded’ both connote derogatory declines in ecology’s relevance to solve our ‘pressing problems’. The paper’s discussion continues on this theme. Ecologists are painted as desperate scientists trying to be relevant to conservation “only to discover that they are not that useful after all” and recent developments “are no more promising”.

This is news to me, as I thought both disciplines essentially had common goals and conservation success stories are essentially based on ecological knowledge. Ecosystem services (disclaimer: one of my main research disciplines ) is a fundamentally ecological concept with fundamentally applied conservation goals.

If this paper was an opinion piece, I’d be less critical. But this is a data paper and the methods simply aren’t suitable to test the hypothesis. A text-mining content analysis of a select group of journals, subjectively chosen as representative of each discipline, is not appropriate to claim that ecological knowledge is not useful to solve conservation problems. The journals chosen aren’t even representative of each discipline*, and it’s simply wrong to conflate a journal’s scope & subjective publication process with the relevance of a whole discipline for solving environmental problems. The authors also seem to think that ‘Ecology’, the discipline, is all about theory and models. It’s not (see here and here ) – these are parts of ecology, but not the whole.

I’ve written about the research niche before. Career success depends on finding a niche, but that niche is built on a combination of substrates. Most researchers work across multiple disciplines and publish across multiple journals. Journals are a publication medium – they have a scope and a subjective editorial process that simply cannot define a discipline’s goals or success rate (whatever that means). I call myself an ecologist, but I work and publish across multiple ‘disciplines’*: ecology, entomology, conservation biology, agricultural science, communication, social science. Does it matter?

Pitting disciplines against each other is not helpful or constructive. We are in unprecedented territory with climate change. The environmental problems we face require collaboration across disciplines, not segregation.

____________________

*The authors choose these journals as representative of each discipline: Ecology (Trends in Ecology & Evolution; American Naturalist; Ecology Letters; Ecology; Oikos; Methods in Ecology & Evolution; Ecography; Biological Conservation; Ecological Applications) Conservation Biology (Conservation Evidence; Oryx; Conservation Biology; Conservation Letters; AMBIO; Conservation & Society; Ecology & Society) I’m an ecologist & I’ve barely published in the ‘ecology’ journals (a book review and a natural history note ), but I’ve published two of my key ‘research niche’ papers in Cons Biol and AMBIO .

© Manu Saunders 2019

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3 thoughts on “ What is a research discipline? We need collaboration, not segregation ”

Hmm. To the extent that the content of conservation journals has moved away from that of ecology journals, wasn’t that kind of inevitable given that conservation biology started out as a very ecology-focused discipline? The amount of focus the discipline gives to sociological and political factors (which are very important to conservation!) had nowhere to go but up, right? Please do correct me if I’ve got the history wrong here, I’m not a conservation biologist…

Another thought: isn’t the story here one of increasing interdisciplinarity of conservation biology, incorporating more of the sociological and political considerations that aren’t traditionally considered part of ecology? That is, the reason why conservation biology appears to be splitting off from ecology “sensu stricto” (at least by the measures considered in the linked paper) is precisely that conservation biology is becoming more interdisciplinary than it used to be? Which if so isn’t quite a story about increasingly-narrow niche specialization and increasingly-separated disciplinary silos, is it?

Just offhand thoughts, which may well reflect lack of background knowledge on my part. Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

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Yes, some fields of conservation biology are becoming more interdisciplinary – and so are some fields of ecology. Many of things that the authors claim separate conservation biology as a ‘more relevant’ discipline, like social/political considerations, are already being addressed by some ecologists and have been inherent to some fields of ecology for years – hence why many ecologists publish in many of the journals they assign as representing cons biol. I think it sounds like they are trying to specifically take aim at theoretical ecology, but don’t specifiy this – sure theoretical ecology may be treated as quite distinct from modern applied conservation biology. But it would be pretty hard to prove that ecological theory has never been useful to conservation success. And there are many conservation biologists that use highly theoretical methods, eg decision theory. Just too many confounding factors to make any of these claims!

• Pingback: Friday links: statistics vs. the humanities, ecology vs. conservation, and more | Dynamic Ecology

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June 10, 2015

Build Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Research Skills

By Patrick McMahon

Discipline-specific research skills can be cultivated both through routine components of the advanced degree, such as required coursework, and other avenues, such as graduate internships. As you work to define and develop a research project, consider seeking relevant opportunities to build a diverse portfolio of research skills and methods.. As you progress toward completion of the degree, consider how you might translate research and data analysis skills into diverse career paths. For more guidance on translating your skills into diverse career paths, visit the Career Exploration and Preparation competency in this guide.

Steps You Can Take

Take on-campus courses.

Many departments offer formal training in the research methods associated with their discipline, allowing students to experiment with different approaches to answering research questions. Because these courses are often offered at an introductory level, it may be useful to revisit or sit in on a course you have already taken again in a later semester after having formulated an independent research project.

Particularly for students who work across disciplines, it may be relevant and useful to enroll in or audit methods courses offered in other fields. This is also a good way to broaden your skill-set in preparation for a variety of academic and non-academic careers. For instance, students in fields that rely primarily on quantitative data may benefit from taking a writing course in preparation for careers that require translating specialized findings for popular audiences or that broadly value strong communication skills. Similarly, many students in humanist and social science fields increasingly discover that their qualitative research and non-academic career preparation may be enhanced through the use of new digital and computational technologies.

Browsing the Berkeley  course catalog  will offer a sense of the wide variety of courses on offer at the University. Note that you may need the permission of the instructor to take a course in another department, and that it is best to request this permission well in advance of the beginning of the course.

Thanks to the Intercampus Exchange and Stanford-Berkeley Exchange  programs , graduate students with an excellent superior academic record may take a limited number of courses that are offered at Stanford or one of the other UC schools, and have the opportunity to make use of special facilities and collections and associate with scholars or fields of study not available on their home campus.

Take Time to Explore Scholarly Publications to Get an Overview of Diverse Research Approaches

While your department may specialize in a particular set of research approaches or methods, you may also wish to review other methods practiced by colleagues in the field, by academics in other disciplines, or (depending on your field) by practitioners associated with your field of study. Reviewing scholarly publications may inspire new research approaches or expand skills not necessarily honed in your home department, pinpointing new ways to distinguish and diversify your professional portfolio. The Library also offers  subject librarians who are available for consultation on particular research projects.

Participate in Working Groups and Attend On-Campus Lectures and Training Sessions

Advanced students may also wish to form research groups based on shared methods or questions that allow them to discuss the opportunities and issues associated with their approach. Creating and participating in research-based discussion groups can help not only to advance your research, but to cultivate leadership and collaboration skills valued in many professions. Some programs on campus, such as the  Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities , have existing groups that you can join and provide support for new working groups .

The Berkeley  D-Lab  offers many resources for acquiring computational and technical skills, which are now broadly used across academic disciplines and various career paths. D-Lab training workshops focus on a wide range of topics, which in the past have included workshops on Text Analysis Fundamentals, Preparing Your Data for Qualitative Data Analysis, Introduction to Georeferencing, and Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks. They also regularly hold training workshops to build skills in a variety of platforms and programming languages, such as Excel, R, Python, and more. Find upcoming trainings and workshops on the D-lab’s Upcoming Workshops page .

The D-Lab also hosts a team of  consultants  who offer free appointments and drop-in hours for advising and troubleshooting on qualitative and quantitative research design, modeling, data collection, data management, analysis, presentation, and related techniques and technologies. Should you have advanced skills in these areas, consider applying to become a graduate consultant at D-Lab.

Participate in Lab Rotations

Many lab-based disciplines have formal programs of lab rotations that allow students to explore a potential research area and develop practical skills. The research rotation offers the opportunity to learn new experimental techniques, gain familiarity with different areas of research, experience the operating procedures of diverse types of labs, and identify mentors within the discipline. While the academic objective is to identify a lab in which to conduct dissertation research, skills gained on rotation can also provide relevant training for research projects and career prospects beyond the dissertation.

In recent years, some non-lab-based disciplines have found it useful to model their operations on the lab-based disciplines. If you are unsure, consider asking your advisors and faculty working in your research area if they have a lab group. For more on lab groups in the humanities, see “ Designing a Lab in the Humanities ,”  Chronicle of Higher Education  (2017).

Serve as a Graduate Student Researcher (GSR)

As in the lab rotation, participation in research projects as a GSR allows students to gain experience, identify strengths, and develop specialized interests. Work with your GSR supervisor to ensure that you are able to make the most of the opportunity: if you want to gain experience approaching the research question through the use of specific tools or methods, it is worth discussing the possibility with your research supervisor.

Be sure to keep track of the different skills you cultivate as part of the assistantship—when requesting recommendation letters to apply for jobs in subsequent years, it will be useful to remind your supervisor of the specific work you did for them. You may be surprised by how many of the disciplinary research skills honed in an assistantship correlate to desired qualifications for various professional positions and translate readily between academic and non-academic contexts. For examples, see Margaret Newhouse, “ Transferring Your Skills to a Non-Academic Setting ,”  Chronicle of Higher Education  (1998) and Stacy Hartman, “ Transferable Skills and How To Talk About Them ,”  MLA Connected Academics  (2016).

Complete Training in Responsible Conduct of Research

Your research may require you to protect the privacy of human subjects, to observe standards for research using animals, and/or to respect the rights of others to be recognized as contributors through proper citation, co-authorship, and obtaining copyright permissions. Online courses, workshops, and staff in the  Sponsored Projects Office  (SPO) can help you learn about these topics, and the Human Research Protection Program can answer questions about the process of getting approval for research with human subjects. 

Learning to use appropriate research methods and apply standards for responsible conduct provides practical experience for any future research-based career, but also engages broader critical-thinking skills about the ethics of research practices, protocols, and data analysis. The ability to conduct research responsibly in an academic setting testifies to the rigor and dedication that can make Ph.D.s appealing candidates for a variety of academic and professional careers.

Use Academic Breaks to Attend Intensive Skill-Building Programs

Some campus programs and centers offer high-intensity short-courses that take place during the spring or summer breaks. For instance, graduate students considering a career in industry or tech sometimes participate in summer bootcamps for coding or other technical skills, or participate in D-Lab summer trainings. These types of programs typically offer certificates of attendance or completion that should be listed (when relevant) on a CV or resume. In addition to the competencies they explicitly provide, they also attest to your ability to acquire a host of new skills in a short period of time.

Explore Bay Area Computational and Data Analysis Skill-Building Resources

As the home to Silicon Valley and multiple world-class universities, the Bay Area is an ideal location for those interested in learning, using, and building careers around computational and technical skills. Students looking to build computational or technical skills may also wish to participate in workshops or attend events at area hubs like the  Stanford Literary Lab  or the  UC Davis Postharvest Technology Center . Groups also exist for connecting locals with technical skills to burgeoning employment opportunities. For instance,  Tech SF  (a branch of the  Bay Area Video Coalition ) seeks to help unemployed tech professionals get the skills they need for a continually changing job market.

Take Advantage of Online Skill-Building Resources

Many discipline-specific, interdisciplinary, and generalist resources exist online for those seeking to expand their technical repertoire—particularly in the realm of computational skills. The  Institute for Digital Research and Education  offers resources, events, and consulting for UC-affiliates, including a wealth of materials accessible online.  BerkeleyX  provides free online courses in a variety of subjects for currently enrolled students, while sites like  Coursera ,  Code Academy  offer a mix of free and low-cost training sessions. Students employed by the University can also access many training videos and courses on LinkedIn Learning .

Students of color can explore the resources offered by the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational & Mixed Methods , which focuses on advancing scholars of color in data science and diverse methodologies.

Acquire Foreign Language Skills Relevant to Research

Certain fields may require students to acquire foreign language skills as part of their progress to degree. However, even when not required, students may wish to acquire new language skills independently, either as a supplement to their academic research or as a bridge to a variety of future careers. UC Berkeley offers instruction in over 80 languages, and fellowships such as the  FLAS  and  Fulbright  are available for graduate students undertaking language study. With its emphasis on the study of critical and less commonly taught foreign languages, the FLAS program is designed to lead into careers in university teaching, government service, or other employment where knowledge of foreign languages and cultures is essential. Participation in the Fulbright program, which offers an English Teaching Assistant program and fellowships for study and research abroad, opens up a wide variety of career paths for graduate students, including  foreign service , academia, and many more.

Identifying interdisciplinary research in research projects

• Published: 24 August 2023
• Volume 128 , pages 5521–5544, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Hoang-Son Pham   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0349-3763 1 , 2 ,
• Bram Vancraeynest 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Hanne Poelmans 1 , 2 , 3   na1 ,
• Sadia Vancauwenbergh 1 , 2 , 3   na1 &
• Amr Ali-Eldin 1 , 2 , 4   na1  

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Identifying interdisciplinary research has become an important area of study in scientometrics. However, defining what exactly constitutes interdisciplinarity and how it manifests in research activities, such as publications or research projects, remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a mathematical modeling approach to interdisciplinarity measurement based on assessing project diversity. Particularly, we propose a novel approach that combines three indicators: the diversity of researchers, the diversity of research organizations, and the diversity of research disciplines involved in the project, to identify potentially interdisciplinary research projects. To measure diversity, we employ various methods, including distance matrix calculation, evaluation of the distance between researchers, and assessment of the relevancy of researchers’ expertise to the projects. We implemented the proposed approach on two datasets; FRIS and Dimensions. We could classify the interdisciplinarity of projects into three groups—Low, Medium, and High. Empirical results analysis supports the proposed approach assumption that the diversity of research projects gets higher when the distances between disciplines in the projects increase. Further, it was shown that the diversity of researchers and organizations was strongly affected by the distance. The number of researchers and organizations had a relatively small impact on the overall diversity score. Furthermore, the relevancy weight can be incorporated as an additional factor in the measurement of interdisciplinary.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by The Expertise Center for Research and Development Monitoring (ECOOM), Flanders, Belgium. The authors would like to acknowledge Dimensions for granting access to their database. Further, the authors would like to thank the reviewers for the feedback and comments that they have made to improve the paper.

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Bram Vancraeynest, Hanne Poelmans, Sadia Vancauwenbergh and Amr Ali-Eldin have contributed equally to this work.

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Centre for Research & Development Monitoring (ECOOM-UHasselt), 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

Hoang-Son Pham, Bram Vancraeynest, Hanne Poelmans, Sadia Vancauwenbergh & Amr Ali-Eldin

Data Science Institute, Hasselt University, 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

Directorate Research, Library, International Office, Hasselt University, 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

Hanne Poelmans & Sadia Vancauwenbergh

Computer engineering and Control systems Department, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, 35516, Egypt

Amr Ali-Eldin

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Correspondence to Hoang-Son Pham .

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Pham, HS., Vancraeynest, B., Poelmans, H. et al. Identifying interdisciplinary research in research projects. Scientometrics 128 , 5521–5544 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04810-6

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Anthropologists Gerontologists Psychologists Sociologists Summary

Natural scientists and some behavioral scientists rely heavily on classic experimentation as the primary tool for scientific research. The power of the experimental method is that scientists tightly control the conditions under which a phenomenon is observed so that they can minimize the likelihood that observations are due to chance or error. In so doing, researchers can determine "causality"—that is, they can conclude that a change in one variable causes a change in another.

Classic experimentation is not always possible in the social sciences. Social scientists study complex phenomena such as cultures, social norms, and behavior that are dynamic and are affected by multiple factors; therefore, it is not always possible to conduct true experiments because it is impossible to allow for every influential factor.

So, how do social scientists conduct research? Do anthropologists tend to use different methods than psychologists, for example? If so, what are the methods typically used by each discipline? Do social scientists ever "borrow" methods used by other disciplines to answer their research questions?

To introduce this topic, let’s look at the ways that different social science disciplines might investigate the life stage known as "retirement." Try to predict research questions that might be posed by different disciplines and the methods that they might use to answer them before you click on the lenses on the left side of the graphic.

Figure 4.18 Retirement, Through a Social Sciences Lens

Anthropologists

Anthropologists have a varied toolkit available to them to answer their research questions. They are well-known for their qualitative research approach, although they also use quantitative methods. Human beings are complex biological and cultural organisms, so anthropologists will integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches in their work.

Here’s an example to illustrate this: People must drink and eat to survive. How would an anthropologist study this behavior? An anthropologist may use a quantitative research approach to examine how food is apportioned differently between men and women in diverse settings. The anthropologist may ask the research question—are men allotted more high-protein food than women in certain cultures, and if so, what are the health outcomes of this difference? An anthropologist also may seek to understand and represent the ways men and women feel about these differences in food apportionment; this is a qualitative research question.

The two research methods that are thought to distinguish anthropology from other social science disciplines are ethnography and participant observation .

Ethnography is a research method that employs personal observations of a living culture. In their fieldwork, anthropologists ask open-ended questions that allow people to respond as they wish. Anthropologists call the people they study informants or consultants to emphasize the expertise of the people and the fact that the people are the experts rather the "subjects" of experiments or "respondents" to a survey with forced-choice questions.

To construct an ethnography, anthropologists ask informants to detail their life histories, draw pictures and maps, tell stories, demonstrate how they make their art and artifacts, or cook their food. In other words, they ask informants to show and tell what it means to live their particular lives. They use statistical procedures or qualitative analyses to make sense of their data.

Anthropologists are interested in uncovering both emic and etic points of view―that is, they try to identify the point of view of the people being studied ("emic") as well as other "outside" perspectives ("etic"). For example, surveys often ask demographic questions that divide people into groups according to age, education, income, marital status, religion, and ethnic group or race. These are standard "etic" categories, typically agreed upon by Western researchers as important markers of difference. On the other hand, people may or may not identify themselves according to these categories, and they may also have other "emic" categories for grouping people, such as clan, political group, or musical style. Indeed, they may not think in terms of differences among people at all.

To better understand the "emic" and "etic" perspectives for the people they are studying, cultural anthropologists use participant observation . In this way, they experience a culture from the "inside" and the "outside." Participant observation is a fieldwork method in which a researcher lives in and participates in a culture. At the same time, he or she observes everyday life and learns how the society actually works.

Gerontologists

Gerontologists are interdisciplinary by training, so they rely on a variety of research methods to answer important scientific questions about aging. They may use surveys to gather information about attitudes and feelings. They may use unstructured interviews and observations to better understand the experience of aging from the perspective of an older adult. Gerontologists interested in health outcomes may collect physical and behavioral measurements.

Because gerontologists are interested in the process of aging, they rely heavily on research designs that follow participants through time. Two such examples are:

longitudinal studies (also known as " panel studies ") that collect data repeatedly from the same participants over an extended period of time.

cohort sequential design , a longitudinal design that follows multiple cohorts across time and allows researchers to differentiate among age, period, and cohort effects (described below). The primary disadvantage of this type of research is that it is expensive, labor-intensive, and takes a long time to complete.

The challenge for gerontologists is to determine whether changes are due to cohort effects , period effects , or age effects .

Cohort effects = Differences between age groups due to the time period in which people are born and raised.

For example, the experience of an African American person born in 1930 (prior to the Civil Rights movement) is very different from that of an African American person born in 1980.

Period effects = Differences between age groups attributable to an historic event or time period.

As an example, if we notice that US alcohol consumption in people 50 and older increases dramatically between 1930 and 1940, we might draw the conclusion that as people get older, they drink more; however, if we remember that Prohibition ended in 1933, we might draw a very different conclusion. That is, the reason people seemed to drink more as they got older is that the ban on alcohol ended during the time period of interest.

Age effects = Physiological, psychosocial, and behavioral changes that are attributable to getting older.

For example, nearly all of us will have some degree of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) as we get older, but what are the psychosocial and behavioral changes that are attributable to the aging process? One example of a true aging effect is that of criminal behavior. Across many generations and time periods, it has been shown that criminality is higher among teens and young adults. As people age, they are less likely to commit crimes (Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1983).

When gerontologists are not interested in "process"(change over time), they may choose a cross-sectional study design. Cross-sectional studies gather data across groups at a single point in time. They tell researchers little about whether differences in age groups can be attributed to age, period, or cohort effects. For example, a gerontologist may compare the eating habits of two groups of 75-year-old men—one group that lives at home, and another in an assisted living environment.

Gerontologists often use their research to advocate for changes in policy and legislation that directly impact older Americans. They are at the forefront when it comes to decisions on Social Security, retirement, Medicare, transportation, and other issues.

Psychologists

Modern psychology is defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism's physical state, mental state, and external environment (Tavris & Wade, 1995).

Let's break down the definition. Behavior refers to any action that can be observed and measured. For example, smiling at a friend, crying at a movie, or blinking your eyes in response to a bright light are examples of behaviors. Mental processes refer to internal aspects of our lives, including thinking, feeling, and perceiving. Thus, calculating 7 + 9, recalling your 16th birthday, and experiencing happiness are mental processes. Our behavior and mental experiences can influence or be influenced by genetics, physical health, level of intelligence, economic situation, culture, ethnicity, and other aspects of our environment.

An important element of psychological research is empiricism , the reliance on information from direct observation and measurement. Experimental psychologists test their hypotheses on laboratory animals in controlled environments, while clinical psychologists conduct their research on human subjects in their natural surroundings.

Psychologists rely heavily on the following research designs:

Correlational research that examines the relationship between variables. Correlational research does not yield cause-and-effect conclusions.

Descriptive research that describes the characteristics of a population or phenomenon of interest. Through the use of descriptive statistics such as averages, frequencies, and ranges, researchers can make observations about the prevalence of certain variables and can make comparisons among groups.

Because psychologists are interested in the measurement of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, they are skilled in the development and use of instruments that capture those constructs. Sophisticated statistical tools allow them to analyze and interpret correlational and descriptive research data.

Sociologists

Sociologists seek to uncover the social factors that affect behavior. The goal of sociologists is to obtain data that test assumptions about the social world. The sociological perspective requires us to look beyond our common sense (which can be faulty), our experience (which can be limited), and our values (which are bound in time and culture) to gain new understandings of the social world.

Sociologists may use quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods in their research. The methods used for a sociological study depend upon the research questions being asked.

Quantitative research in sociology employs methods such as surveys (developed to answer specific research questions) and secondary data analysis (research using existing data sets gathered for general purposes). A quantitative design attempts to amass information from large numbers of people. It often requires respondents to answer prepared (close-ended) questions. Close-ended questions are limiting in that they do not allow respondents to describe how they see or experience their world.

Qualitative research employs some of the methods already discussed for other social sciences. Qualitative methods include interviews (asking people open-ended questions), content analysis (research to study content to uncover the explicit and implicit or hidden meanings), and participant observation (observation of, and involvement in, the social interaction patterns of groups). In qualitative studies, sociologists may ask subjects why they act in certain ways or what rules and assumptions govern their behavior. Questions in qualitative research instruments are more open-ended.

The following are limitations of qualitative methods:

• greater potential for bias (because researchers themselves can be influenced by their subjects)
• difficulty in generalizing findings to larger groups, given the small sample size in studies

What sets the social science disciplines apart from each other? Anthropologists, gerontologists, psychologists, and sociologists all select their research designs and methods based on clearly articulated research hypotheses and questions. Their designs and methods can be either qualitative, quantitative, or mixed. What truly sets the disciplines apart are the principles and theories that guide their research and interpretation of data.

For more information on those principles and theories, check out the Social Science Perspectives module.

Research Disciplines

Chemistry — the science of matter — is central to the modern intellectual world view.

Researchers in the Department of Chemistry study problems that range from how chromosomes fold and the molecular basis of neural function and memory to the construction of nanoscale sensors and imaging tools as well as advancing the art of organic synthesis and its application to the development of anti-cancer drugs. Understanding matter so that we can manipulate it also forms the basis of our economic life, enabling the provision of energy, the construction of electronic devices, the preservation of the environment and the improvement of human health.

Our research and educational efforts fall in the areas of Chemistry of Life , Materials by Chemical Design , and Chemistry for Energy and Sustainability . In the coming years, the main goal of the Department will be to strengthen our technical breadth and strive for further depth in areas of existing expertise while continuing to grow in impact on the international scientific stage. Because of these drivers at the level of the overall discipline as well as our local environment and historical strengths, the Department of Chemistry reaffirms its commitment to its world-class foundational programs seen below. These programs can act as nuclei for Rice to achieve national and international preeminence in 21st century chemical science.

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Nanomaterial synthesis, organic synthesis, spectroscopy and imaging, theory and computation, research institutes and centers, helpful links.

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Research Disciplines

Astrochemistry at UVa covers a variety of research topics involving the chemistry that occurs in interstellar clouds of gas and dust

The field of astrochemistry is concerned with the study of chemical processes that occur in extraterrestrial environments. One example of this research area is the study of the formation of chemical compounds from ‘star stuff’, the basic building blocks that fill the interstellar void and which go on to form planetary bodies and stars. Modelling this chemistry can shed light on the way molecules are produced and distributed in interstellar space, and how they may be ultimately incorporated into planets and other bodies. Improving our understanding of these processes throughout the universe expands our fundamental knowledge and gives us insight into the development of our own corner of space.

Astrochemistry at UVa covers a variety of research topics, such as: chemistry in interstellar clouds of gas and dust throughout our galaxy and others; complex organic chemistry during the collapse of portions of these clouds to produce new stars; coupled chemical and physical models of star and planet formation, including protoplanetary disks; and the chemical evolution of comets.

This research uses large kinetic simulations to model the concentrations of molecules, many of which are unusual by terrestrial standards given the extreme differences in temperatures and pressures from laboratory conditions. The results of these simulations can be validated and improved through comparison to spectroscopic observations of these molecules using radiotelescopes. Such comparisons yield a better understanding of the physical conditions in interstellar clouds, especially the regions that are collapsing to form stars. Related chemical reactions thought to occur in the interstellar medium are studied by theoretical and experimental methods; these reactions occur both in the gas phase and on surfaces of tiny dust particles known as interstellar grains. By simulating the chemistry on an astronomical timescale (millions of years), we can trace the progression of molecular complexity in the galaxy and understand the chemical enrichment of the material that will ultimately form stars and planets. For more information on current research projects in this area, visit the faculty websites below.

• Ilse Cleeves
• Robin Garrod
• Eric Herbst
• Brooks Pate

With roots in analytical chemistry, the bioanalytical field aims to quantify and detect varying small and macromolecules.

With roots in analytical chemistry, the bioanalytical field aims to quantify and detect varying small and macromolecules. Quantification and detection are crucial for researchers to identify and better understand molecules present in their sample of interest. Researchers utilize bioanalysis for a variety of different applications in fields such as forensic analysis, pharmacology, immunology, among others. 

While this field is far-reaching, bioanalytical groups at the University of Virginia have a particular emphasis on designing and using new instrumentation: from electrochemistry to microfluidic devices, separation techniques, mass spectrometry, and high-resolution microscopy. These new technologies facilitate better chemical measurements in proteomics, forensics, clinical analysis and diagnostics, and live cell and tissue measurements, including microbial communities, the immune system, and the brain. We combine our chemistry expertise with researchers in the schools of engineering and medicine in order to maximize the societal impact of our research.  For more information on current research that is underway in the various labs visit their faculty websites below.

• David Cafiso
• Cassandra Fraser
• Andreas Gahlmann
• James Landers
• Marcos Pires
• Rebecca Pompano
• Cliff Stains
• Jill Venton

Biophysical Chemistry seeks to explain biological mechanisms using a combination of chemical and physical concepts and techniques.

Biophysical Chemistry seeks to explain biological mechanisms using a combination of chemical and physical concepts and techniques. Cells have a highly dynamic and complex environment composed of varying biomolecules with specific functions that we seek to understand. At UVA, we develop and apply: (i) new measurement technologies, (ii) various formalisms from the physical sciences, as well as (iii) data analytics and computational modeling tools.

These various approaches enable one to develop an integrated understanding of the structural properties, dynamics, and functions of biological molecules through techniques like super-resolution imaging, statistical mechanics, and molecular simulations. Biophysical Chemistry necessitates collaboration and enables students to develop expertise in a breadth of techniques and fields. 

More specifically, Biophysical Chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary branch of science that seeks to elucidate biomolecular mechanisms in terms of the underlying physicochemical driving forces. This field sits at the junction of many other areas—including structural and computational biology, molecular biophysics, imaging and microscopy methods, and biomolecular spectroscopy. Biophysical chemists develop and apply (i) new measurement technologies (such as super-resolution imaging in live cells), (ii) various formalisms from the physical sciences (such as statistical mechanics), as well as (iii) data analytics and computational modeling tools (such as molecular simulations). Together, these various approaches enable one to develop an integrated understanding of the structural properties, dynamics, and functions of biological molecules in the contexts of their native environments (living cells, tissues, etc.). By its very nature, research in biophysical chemistry is often highly collaborative; this, in turn, enables students to develop expertise in working across boundaries that span conventional disciplines.  For more information on current research that is underway in the various labs visit their faculty websites below.

• John Bushweller
• Linda Columbus
• Kateri DuBay
• Charles Grisham

The study of catalysis is concerned with developing and understanding chemical processes that use a catalyst , a molecule that makes a desi

The study of catalysis is concerned with developing and understanding chemical processes that use a catalyst , a molecule that makes a desirable chemical reaction occur more rapidly without being consumed. A relatively small amount of a catalyst can facilitate many hundreds of thousands of reactions before degrading, enabling energy and resource efficiency, often at large scales. Catalytic processes are used in approximately 90% of all industrial chemical processes, and catalytic reactions are central to the pharmaceutical, chemical, and energy sectors. Thus, innovations in catalysis are critical to the preparation of new medicines, conversion of solar energy to chemical fuels, and the development of more environmentally benign methods to produce materials used by modern society. 

Faculty in the Department of Chemistry are pursuing a broad array of fundamental advancements in the field of catalysis. Research efforts span homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, metal (transition and main group) and organo-catalysis, as well as thermal, photo- and electrocatalysis. A primary focus is on the development of new catalytic materials/processes and understanding the mechanisms of those catalysts. For more information on current research that is underway in the various labs, visit the faculty websites below.

• Brent Gunnoe
• Dean Harman
• Ian Harrison
• Michael Hilinski
• Charles Machan

The field of chemical biology focuses on the use of chemical approaches, particularly synthetic chemistry, to answer biological questions as well a

The field of chemical biology focuses on the use of chemical approaches, particularly synthetic chemistry, to answer biological questions as well as to develop modulators of protein function. Chemical biology has roots in both chemistry and biochemistry, fostering scientific creativity from the interdisciplinary nature of chemical biology research. Research in this area includes the development of novel approaches to using small molecules to modulate the activity of proteins as well as the development of new methods to measure specific biological activities, particularly in cells. These efforts can lead to the development of new treatments for diseases as well as biomarkers for the detection and/or monitoring of disease. 

The complexity of biology demands quantitative and molecular solutions that can only be answered by tools and methodologies derived from chemistry, including chemical proteomics, spectroscopy, single-molecule measurements, and design of molecules and proteins to modulate or probe cellular systems. Faculty at UVA conducting research in chemical biology provide a foundational training environment to encourage students to develop their own ideas and make exciting new discoveries. For more information on current research underway in the various labs visit their faculty websites below.

Chemical Education Research

Chemical education researchers at UVa focus on transforming STEM instruction at the undergraduate level by studying faculty and teaching assistants.

Chemical Education Researchers work towards enhancing STEM instruction at the undergraduate level – with a specific emphasis on the field of chemistry – by studying the teaching practices of faculty and student teaching assistants. Researchers at UVA explore instructors’ cognition, instructional practices, and contextual factors that influence their teaching by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods such as interviews and observations. A better understanding of the factors which affect instruction and learning enables the development of improved instructional methods and benefits student outcomes in classroom settings. For more information on current research underway in the various labs visit their faculty websites below.

• Marilyne Stains  
• Lindsay Wheeler  

Molecular detection and quantification are integral to an improved understanding of biological and physiological processes.

Molecular detection and quantification are integral to an improved understanding of biological and physiological processes. Research in the areas of Imaging and Sensing is concerned with developing methods and instrumentation to detect and probe specific reactions or molecules in chemically dense environments. Researchers at UVA couple an understanding of efficient and selective chemical and biological reactions with sensitive analytical techniques and manufacturing processes to realize fundamental advancements in our ability to detect and quantify molecules and processes of interest. 

Specific approaches include the development of small-molecule probes, responsive dyes, molecular sensors, biomaterials, nanoparticles, and nanotube electrodes which are sensitive to detection methods based on luminescence, magnetism, electrochemistry, microscopy, and mass spectrometry. There is a complementary interest in integrating these methods with advanced microfabrication, bioengineering, and microfluidics techniques to minimize the invasiveness of imaging and sensing, decrease required sample sizes, and accurately characterize interrelated chemical pathways. Overall, the development of new sensing and imaging technologies is enabling important advancements in biology, medicine, forensics, environmental science, and other fields. For more information on current research underway in the various labs, please visit their faculty websites below.

• Kevin Lehmann

The field of Inorganic Chemistry broadly focuses on the study of inorganic compounds, which are generally defined as compounds that are primarily m

The field of Inorganic Chemistry broadly focuses on the study of inorganic compounds, which are generally defined as compounds that are primarily made up of non-carbon elements. In the subfield of organometallic chemistry, chemists study compounds in which there is at least one organic group (i.e., carbon-containing) bonded to a metallic element. This field involves fundamental aspects of both the organic and inorganic chemistry fields. Due to the large number of compounds that fall into the category of inorganic chemistry, chemists in this field address a wide variety of chemical problems. 

Researchers at UVA Chemistry apply these concepts to multiple areas, including small molecule sensing, (electro)catalytic production of commodity chemicals and precursors, nanomaterials development, renewable energy conversion, small-molecule activation and the study of photochemical processes. Using a variety of synthetic, spectroscopic, and computational methods, fundamental and applied questions relevant to inorganic, organometallic, coordination, main group, rare earth, bioinorganic, supramolecular, and materials chemistry are being explored. For more information on current research underway in the various labs, visit the faculty websites below.

The fields of Nanoscience and Materials Chemistry are rapidly expanding and multidisciplinary areas of research with diverse applications in biomed

The fields of Nanoscience and Materials Chemistry are rapidly expanding and multidisciplinary areas of research with diverse applications in biomedicine, energy conversion and storage, optics, electronics and magnetism, among others. Nanoscience is largely focused on the chemistry of structures, materials, or groups of atoms or molecules on the scale of nanometers (10-9 m or one-billionth of a meter). The chemistry that happens at this scale is often completely different than that which occurs at either smaller (single atoms or molecules) or larger (visible to the human eye) length scales and allows us to solve chemical problems and develop materials with radically new and different properties.

UVA Faculty interested in Nanosciences and Materials focus on developing innovative synthetic methods, advanced characterization strategies, multi-scale simulations and new device fabrications, to increase our understanding of structure-property relationships, uncover emergent phenomena and accelerate the transition from lab bench to the consumer. Designing, discovering and synthesizing novel structures through atomic, molecular and nanoscale control is critical to manipulating and improving the chemical and physical properties of materials. For more information on current research underway in the various labs visit their faculty websites below.

• Sergei Egorov
• Charlie Machan

The study of organic chemistry focuses on creating chemical compounds that impact our lives as pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, materials, a

The study of organic chemistry focuses on creating chemical compounds that impact our lives as pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, materials, and polymers, using carbon as the central element. Fundamentally, research in this area develops efficient ways to create structurally diverse and valuable chemical compounds from cheap and abundant precursors. Despite extensive and ongoing research in this area, there are still limitations in terms of cost and practicality associated with the production of many important organic compounds and materials. The study of Organic Chemistry can enable a greater understanding of the structure, properties, and function of carbon-containing compounds toward the goal of designing next-generation solutions to societal challenges and increasing our knowledge about the chemistry of life.

Faculty at UVA pursue these goals in an interdisciplinary way, combining concepts from catalysis, drug discovery, materials chemistry, organometallic chemistry, and chemical biology to develop fundamentally new bond-forming processes and methodologies. Using reaction development, structural optimization, biocompatibility strategies, and labeling techniques, researchers are discovering efficient chemical transformations, therapeutic treatments, benign soft materials, and biological signaling pathways. For more information on current research underway in the various labs visit their faculty websites below.

Surface Chemistry focuses on understanding chemical reactions on a molecular level at the interface of two phases of matter, e.g.

Surface Chemistry focuses on understanding chemical reactions on a molecular level at the interface of two phases of matter, e.g. gas molecules reacting with a solid metallic surface. Spectroscopic analysis is an integral part of this research, enabling researchers to monitor the distributions, concentrations and dynamics of reactants, intermediates, and products in these chemical reactions. Researchers at UVA apply these principles to a wide a range of areas, from the development of new laser and microwave methods for gas phase molecular spectroscopy, to the application of NMR and ESR spectroscopies to membrane-bound protein characterization in liquids, and the application of solid surface spectroscopies (XPS, AES, TDS, RAIRS, STS, etc.) to understand material behavior and reactivity.

This research is integral to the development of many modern technologies including fuels, semiconductors, nanoscale particles, biomedical devices, and immunological therapies. For more information on current research underway in the various labs, visit the faculty websites below.

Theoretical and computational work at UVa makes use of advanced analytical and numerical tools to investigate phenomena of interest in fields ranging from biology to materials science to astrochemistry. 

The field of theory and computation allows researchers to model and simulate phenomena that are otherwise difficult to study with existing techniques. These models and simulations are rooted in mathematics and computer science and allow researchers to gather large amounts of data through the use and development of algorithms. While these algorithms are written in a variety of different computer languages, each is aimed at answering a specific research question of interest. 

Theoretical and computational work at UVA makes use of advanced analytical and numerical tools to investigate phenomena of interest in fields ranging from biology to materials science to astrochemistry. The DuBay Group studies self-organization of nanomaterials in complex environments using numerical approaches including atomistic molecular dynamics simulations and coarse-grained modeling. The Egorov Group investigates the behaviors of supercritical fluids using classical statistical mechanics, while also working to apply quantum and semi-classical approaches to investigate chemical systems in which many-body effects play an important role. The Garrod Group studies the formation of simple and complex organic molecules on the surface of and within astrophysical dust grains and ices. A novel Kinetic Monte Carlo approach is used to simulate surface chemistry taking place on dust grains over interstellar timescales. The Herbst Group is interested in the chemical processes by which molecules in interstellar clouds grow. Numerical approaches are used to simulate these chemical processes in order to predict the actual concentrations of such molecules. Finally, theoretical and computational tools are playing an increasingly significant role in the investigations of many experimental groups in the department, both through collaborations with resident theorists and through group-specific projects that include a significant computational component. For more information on current research underway in the various labs visit the faculty profiles or websites below.

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Seventeen Arts & Humanities projects receive grants to advance scholarship, research and creative interests

Seventeen arts & humanities projects receive grants to advance scholarship, research and creative interests.

The Research & Innovation Office (RIO) Arts & Humanities Grant Program announced nearly $95,000 in combined funding  for  17 projects  exploring topics in disciplines from Asian languages and environmental design to composition and Classics.

The RIO Arts & Humanities Grant Program is inspired by recognition of the essential role of the arts and humanities at CU Boulder, including inspiring deeper connections with others, welcoming multiple and diverse perspectives, and contemplating what it means to be human.  

Applications for the program were requested by April 15 and subsequently reviewed and ranked by arts and humanities faculty based on the following criteria:

• Significance/value of the project to arts, humanities and/or humanistic social sciences
• Potential of the project to contribute to the field(s) (and potentially beyond)
• Appropriate proposal for use of funds
• How the project will impact the applicant’s career development
• Appropriate evaluation to assess the project’s success
• Qualifications of the applicant(s) and relevance of those qualifications to the project

2024 Arts & Humanities Grant Awardees

• Project : Digital Man'yōshū': Mapping Japan's Oldest Poetry Collection Awardee : Marjorie Burge (Asian Languages & Civilizations)
• Project : Undesigning the Sustainability Narrative: Exploring the Underrepresentation of Women in Sustainable Design through a Multicultural and Regional Lens / In-Depth Interviews with Female Leaders in Biomaterial and Sustainable Design Labs to Address Gender Disparities in Sustainable Design Awardee : Caitlin Charlet (Environmental Design)
• Project : Review, Reinterpret, Reimagine: Improving Archiving Practices of Western Colonial-era Photographs of Southeast Asia (1850s-1950s) in American Academic Libraries Awardee : Lauren Collins (Center for Asian Studies)
• Project : Intimacy Coordinator (Controlled Environment) Awardee : Molly Valentine Dierks (Art and Art History)
• Project : Mauna Kea: Where Sky and Land Meet Awardee : Christian Hammons (Anthropology / Critical Media)
• Project : Jake Heggie and the Rise in Prominence of American Opera in the 21st Century Awardee : Leigh Holman (Voice)
• Project : Studying Greek and Italian Material Culture from an Iron Age Hillfort Site on the Island of Brač, Croatia Awardee : Sarah James (Classics)
• Project : Capturing Collectives Memories of the Disappeared with Artificial Intelligence Awardee : Tomas Laurenzo Coronel (Critical Media Practices)
• Project : Vessels at the Tank Awardee : Grace Leslie (College of Music / ATLAS)
• Project : Fossilgrams for the Revolution Awardee : Jeanne Liotta (Cinema Studies & Moving Images)
• Project : Resonance of Change: Anthony R. Green's Saxophone Concerto Awardee : Nathan Mertens (College of Music)
• Project : The Western Argolid Regional Project, 2024 Study Season Awardee : Dmitri Nakassis (Classics)
• Project : The Audacity of Pleasure: Race, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Feeling Good Awardee : Crystal Nelson (Art and Art History)
• Project : Keywords for a Black Ecology Awardee : Omedi Ochieng (Communication)
• Project : True Mirror Awardee : Jeanne Quinn (Art and Art History)
• Project : Electronic Music Production for Development and Premiere of DETECTIVE CONVENTION with Slagwerk Den Haag at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek Festival in Utrecht, The Netherlands Awardee : Annika Socolofsky (Composition)
• Project : Why is Silicon Valley Talking About the Antichrist? Awardee : Benjamin Teitelbaum (Musicology / International Affairs)

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Immersive lab seeks to bridge translational AI across a range of fields to drive discovery

Brenda Ellis

May 6, 2024, 4:24 PM

Vanderbilt University has created a transformational lab focused on leveraging immersive translational AI to drive discovery across disciplines ranging from medicine and materials science to the humanities, social science and education.

The new Vanderbilt Lab for Immersive AI Translation (VALIANT) will act as a dynamic regional Translational AI hub, as well as serve as a center of gravity for strategic national partnerships and engagement in AI policy. Researchers in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and biomedical engineering are engaged with as many as 350 interdisciplinary co-authors throughout Vanderbilt and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Discovery Vanderbilt is an initiative led by the Office of the Provost and is one of three pathways in the university’s Dare to Grow campaign to support and extend the resources underpinning Vanderbilt’s most innovative research and education.

Previously announced centers include the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research , the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator , the Vanderbilt Center for Research on Inequality and Health and, most recently, the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate .

VALIANT will be led by Bennett Landman , a preeminent scholar who holds the Stevenson Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering and has joint appointments in computer science, biomedical engineering, radiology and radiological sciences, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, biomedical informatics, and neurology. Landman also serves as chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Professor Landman’s vision for VALIANT is nothing short of inspirational,” said Krish Roy , Bruce and Bridgitt Dean of Engineering and University Distinguished Professor. “He has a deep understanding of AI’s potential, coupled with a passion to explore the many innovative ways to use the technology to improve the lives of everyone in our local communities and throughout the region.”

Tapping into Vanderbilt’s broad faculty expertise, VALIANT seeks to connect research efforts in translational AI to drive discovery in three primary areas:

• Humanities, social science and education

The Lab’s AI Scholars and AI Faculty Fellows programs for doctoral students and faculty researchers, respectively, will provide excellent growth opportunities for its members. VALIANT will also leverage an existing network of international research collaborators to engage industry, visiting scholars and student trainees from around the world. Additionally, VALIANT plans numerous bridge programs and institutional partnerships to foster regional collaborations throughout Middle Tennessee.

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Three from MIT awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships

Mit professors roger levy, tracy slatyer, and martin wainwright appointed to the 2024 class of “trail-blazing fellows.”.

MIT faculty members Roger Levy, Tracy Slatyer , and Martin Wainwright are among 188 scientists, artists, and scholars awarded 2024 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 52 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 3,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows. This year, MIT professors were recognized in the categories of neuroscience, physics, and data science.

Roger Levy is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Combining computational modeling of large datasets with psycholinguistic experimentation, his work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing, and helps to design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language. He is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, and a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Tracy Slatyer is a professor in the Department of Physics as well as the Center for Theoretical Physics in the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research . Her research focuses on dark matter — novel theoretical models, predicting observable signals, and analysis of astrophysical and cosmological datasets. She was a co-discoverer of the giant gamma-ray structures known as the “Fermi Bubbles” erupting from the center of the Milky Way, for which she received the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2021. She is also a recipient of a Simons Investigator Award and Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers.

Martin Wainwright is the Cecil H. Green Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mathematics, and affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and Statistics and Data Science Center . He is interested in statistics, machine learning, information theory, and optimization. Wainwright has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Medallion Lectureship and Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Joint Statistical Societies. Wainwright has also co-authored books on graphical and statistical modeling, and solo-authored a book on high dimensional statistics.

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” says Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

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ASPCA invites applications for research in animal welfare

ASPCApro provides training, research, and resources to help animal welfare professionals save more lives.

The ASPCA invites applications for its research grants program, which funds high-quality research across a variety of disciplines and methods that have clear potential to benefit animals, either directly or through effecting systems-level change. This year, proposals are being solicited in the following five research areas:

Cruelty Research: Grants of up to $50,000 will be awarded in support of proposals that address animal cruelty from any angle or relevant discipline (e.g., public policy, law, criminal justice, criminology, veterinary forensics, community engagement, prevention/intervention, human behavior change). Of particular interest is research that analyzes the effectiveness of legislative and other policy measures designed to prevent and/or respond to cruelty. Also of interest is research that heightens awareness of animal cruelty and builds knowledge that informs and engages key community stakeholders and allied professionals in preventing and responding to the animal welfare issue. 

Access to Veterinary Care (AVC) Research: Grants of up to $50,000 will be awarded in support of proposals that address AVC from any angle (e.g., medical, legal, AVC impact, program delivery, community engagement, veterinary engagement). Ideally, the research will establish tools or guidelines to improve access to veterinary care.

Applied Behavior Research: Grants of up to $40,000 will be awarded in support of proposals that inform the development or refinement of evidence-based shelter behavior protocols. Proposed research should address specific behavior concerns in shelter populations that lead to euthanasia, rather than general management protocols. 

Psychological Trauma Research: Grants of up to $20,000 will be awarded in support of proposals related to developing novel approaches to the documentation of animal cruelty and neglect in the absence of physical trauma. Proposals are encouraged from any relevant discipline (e.g. physiology, psychology, ethology). Of particular interest is research that focuses on objective measures, including biomarkers and quantitative behavioral phenotyping.

Farm Animal Welfare Research : Grants of up to $30,000 will be awarded in support of research related to animal welfare conditions in the largest U.S. poultry industries, which produce broiler chickens, egg-laying hens, and turkeys.

Eligible applicants include investigators and/or research teams affiliated with U.S. public or private entities such as universities, colleges, government agencies, veterinary hospitals and clinics, animal welfare organizations, and other organizations.

For complete program guidelines and application instructions, see the ASPCA website.

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Western Graduate Students, Faculty Member Receive Distinguished Achievement Award

Recipients conducting important research in four disciplines

Western Colorado University’s School of Graduate Studies is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2024 Distinguished Achievement in Graduate Studies Awards. These awards celebrate exceptional students who have demonstrated outstanding academic performance, leadership, and community impact throughout their graduate careers. The Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year award spotlights a faculty member’s extraordinary commitment to the holistic development of graduate students—intellectually, professionally, and personally.

This year, the awards were presented to four remarkable members of our community.

Etinosa Igunbor received The Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Research, or Creative Work in Graduate Studies in recognition of his outstanding academic record and the quality of his culminating thesis. Igunbor will graduate in May with a Master of Environmental Management after taking on extra coursework beyond the program requirements. He designed and implemented rigorous and impactful research on the effects of wet meadow restoration on soil moisture.

Leonardo Leyva Jimenez received The Impact Award in Graduate Studies , which recognizes one exemplary graduate student for their character, service, outstanding contributions to their field of study, and academic achievement. As a Lead Mentor in the Mentor Endorsement Program, Jimenez supported mentors through their year of coaching a new teacher in the classroom, and he has consistently demonstrated a commitment to fostering positivity in our public schools. He will be graduating in May with a Master of Arts in Education .

Cole Cooper received The Award for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ+) in Graduate Studies , which honors a graduate student who demonstrates outstanding commitment to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice either through community outreach and engagement, research, scholarship, or creative work. Cooper’s master’s research focuses on better understanding the healthcare disparities among the Gunnison Valley’s Hispanic population , particularly the Cora people, by learning the Cora community’s health beliefs and partnering with Gunnison Valley Health to apply his findings. He will graduate in May with a Master of Behavioral Science in Rural Community Health .

This year, the Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award went to Laura Pritchett, Ph.D. , director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing’s Nature Writing Concentration . This award recognizes Dr. Pritchett’s exceptional commitment to mentoring and supporting graduate students throughout their academic careers in a year when she published two critically acclaimed novels. Her willingness to share her journey as an author is an invaluable opportunity for her students to see how creative work can move from the concept phase to the bookstore shelf.

“The Distinguished Achievement in Graduate Studies Awards are a testament to the intellectual rigor and commitment of our students, and the strong culture of mentoring among dedicated faculty across all of our graduate programs,” Associate Provost Dr. Kelsey Bennett said. “These individuals not only excel academically, but they also enhance the vibrancy of our university community through their diverse contributions to their respective fields of knowledge and creative work. We are immensely proud to recognize their achievements and look forward to seeing the ongoing impact of their work.”

The awards ceremony took place on May 3 at the University Center, where students, faculty, and families gathered to celebrate the accomplishments of these outstanding scholars.

For additional information about the School of Graduate Studies at Western Colorado University, please visit western.edu .

Author Credit: Seth Mensing

Photo Credit: Emma Brophy, Olivia Reinhardt and courtesy

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UTSA announces bold initiative to establish new College in AI, Cyber, Computing and Data Science

MAY 1, 2024 — UTSA has announced a pioneering initiative to reshape its academic landscape with the creation of a new college dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, computing, data science and related disciplines. This initiative aligns with the university’s commitment to innovation and academic excellence while also positioning UTSA to lead in the rapidly evolving landscape of advanced technologies.

Nearly 6,000 students are enrolled in AI, cyber, computing and data science-related degree programs at UTSA, reflecting a 31% increase since 2019. UTSA graduated more than 1,000 students in these programs, currently distributed across four colleges, in 2022-2023.

“The convergence of AI, data science, computing, and cybersecurity signifies a very forward-looking endeavor as we embrace the fifth industrial revolution, now especially propelled by AI advancements,” UTSA President  Taylor Eighmy said. “These disciplines will remain intertwined for the foreseeable future. With an escalating demand for emerging technologies, their applications, and the demand for a skilled workforce, this new college will greatly accelerate UTSA’s economic and workforce impact here in San Antonio, across Texas, and nationally.”

“This initiative is driven by our commitment to fostering innovation, advancing research and delivering educational excellence across related disciplines.”

The proliferation of artificial intelligence applications, in particular, in recent years has contributed to unprecedented advancements across industries including health care, finance, manufacturing and more, as organizations harness the power of AI and machine learning to streamline processes and drive innovation. Amidst the dynamic expansion of AI, as well as data science and cybersecurity, the demand for skilled professionals is reaching unprecedented heights.

According to Cybersecurity Ventures, there are approximately 3.5 million open positions in cybersecurity and data science globally, highlighting the critical need for expertise in safeguarding digital assets and extracting meaningful insights from vast datasets. In Texas alone, there are over 46,000 job opportunities in these fields, as reported by Cyberseek.

Computerworld's analysis indicates a significant surge in job creation, with an estimated five million roles emerging in 2022, spanning data science, AI/machine learning, cloud computing, cybersecurity, product management, and digital social media. Looking ahead, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 36% increase in data scientist jobs and a 35% increase in cybersecurity jobs nationally over the next decade.

In Texas, the growth trajectory is impressive, with a forecasted 26.5% increase in AI and data science jobs, underscoring the state's pivotal role in shaping the future workforce in these transformative fields.

In an email to UTSA faculty and staff, Interim Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Heather Shipley announced the formation of the AI, Cyber, Computing and Data Science Planning Advisory Task Force to lead a planning exercise to establish the new college. The task force is charged with surveying student interests, regional workforce needs and partnering opportunities; exploring multidisciplinary research opportunities; and recommending a college organizational structure that aligns these programs to enhance student success, career readiness and transdisciplinary research.

Jonathon Halbesleben , dean of the Carlos Alvarez College of Business, and Jianwei Niu , interim dean of University College, will serve as task force chairs.

Shipley noted that similar initiatives led to the creation of the College for Health, Community and Policy in 2019 and the Margie and Bill Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design in 2021.

“Ensuring UTSA students are well-prepared for their chosen careers in the dynamic transdisciplinary workforce is our most important responsibility,” Shipley said. “This initiative is driven by our commitment to fostering innovation, advancing research and delivering educational excellence across related disciplines. More specifically, it seeks to amplify synergies among academic and research domains, fostering the transdisciplinary collaboration that is critical to developing our students’ ability to tackle complex, multifaceted challenges as the future leaders in these fields.”

UTSA has been a trailblazer in the fields of AI, cyber, computing and data science. The School of Data Science , established in 2018, is only school of its kind at a Carnegie R1 U.S. Hispanic Serving Institution. It has achieved significant milestones, including being awarded $1.2 million for student training and research programs, hosting the national Academic Data Science Alliance annual meeting in 2023, and designing a new certificate program in data engineering, which will be offered beginning this summer. San Pedro I , the downtown San Antonio home for the School of Data Science, now is a hub for more than 1,000 students and researchers.

Veronica Salazar , UTSA chief enterprise development officer and senior vice president for business affairs, emphasized the strategic alignment of this initiative with UTSA’s investment in downtown San Antonio and the city’s tech corridor.

“Through this initiative, we are not only investing in the intellectual capital of our students but also contributing to the growth and vibrancy of downtown San Antonio,” Salazar said. “This initiative is a testament to UTSA’s dedication to providing a dynamic hub in our city’s core for education, research and engagement, further solidifying our role as a key player in the San Antonio's development.”

The task force is expected to deliver its final report outlining specific recommendations for a new organizational structure to enhance student success, career readiness and transdisciplinary research in June. Discussions with potentially impacted faculty, as well as other campus and external stakeholders, will follow in Fall 2024.

— Rebecca Luther

UTSA Today is produced by University Communications and Marketing , the official news source of The University of Texas at San Antonio. Send your feedback to [email protected] . Keep up-to-date on UTSA news by visiting UTSA Today . Connect with UTSA online at Facebook , Twitter , Youtube and Instagram .

Doctoral Conferral Ceremony

At this memorable celebration, UTSA graduates will be introduced one-by-one to cross the stage and accept their doctoral degrees.

Roadrunner Walk

Roadrunner Walk is an event for graduating students to have a memorable walk on campus to celebrate an important milestone and their achievements. Graduates will walk along the Paseo while being celebrated by the UTSA community, friends, and family members.

Willie Velásquez: Su Voz – A Plática

Join us for a tribute to Willie Velásquez, honoring the legacy of Willie Velásquez, a pivotal figure in shaping the history of Latino and Hispanic participation in the American voting process. Delve into his life and contributions as a champion of Latino voting rights. Moderated by UTSA's Teresa Niño, the event will feature influential voices, including Jane Velásquez, María Antonietta Berriozábal, Dora Oliva, and Anthony Gonzales.

Commencement: Ceremony One

Celebrate the accomplishments of College of Education and Human Development, College for Health, Community and Policy, College of Sciences and University College.

Commencement: Ceremony Two

Celebrate the accomplishments of Alvarez College of Business, College of Liberal and Fine Arts and Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design.

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University of Texas at San Antonio receives ‘transformational’ $40M gift

Utsa’s mission.

The University of Texas at San Antonio is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through research and discovery, teaching and learning, community engagement and public service. As an institution of access and excellence, UTSA embraces multicultural traditions and serves as a center for intellectual and creative resources as well as a catalyst for socioeconomic development and the commercialization of intellectual property - for Texas, the nation and the world.

UTSA’s Vision

To be a premier public research university, providing access to educational excellence and preparing citizen leaders for the global environment.

UTSA’s Core Values

We encourage an environment of dialogue and discovery, where integrity, excellence, inclusiveness, respect, collaboration and innovation are fostered.

UTSA’S Destinations

• UTSA will be a model for student success
• UTSA will be a great public research university
• UTSA will be an innovative place to work, learn and discover

UTSA is a proud Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) as designated by the U.S. Department of Education .

Our Commitment to Inclusivity

The University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution situated in a global city that has been a crossroads of peoples and cultures for centuries, values diversity and inclusion in all aspects of university life. As an institution expressly founded to advance the education of Mexican Americans and other underserved communities, our university is committed to promoting access for all. UTSA, a premier public research university, fosters academic excellence through a community of dialogue, discovery and innovation that embraces the uniqueness of each voice.

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