Developing Multidisciplinary Research Connections

The most valuable conversations happen outside your department. I spent years laser-focused on economics, surrounded by fellow econ PhDs. Looking back, I missed countless opportunities to connect with computer science, sociology, and psychology students working on fascinating intersections of our fields. No field exists in isolation. The most innovative solutions often come from unexpected connections. Today's tech challenges require understanding both economic incentives AND human behavior AND computational methods. 5 actionable steps I wish I had taken: Schedule one coffee chat per week with a PhD from another department Join cross-disciplinary reading groups or seminars monthly Attend thesis defense presentations from related fields Partner with students from other departments for university workshops/events Create study groups for shared methodology courses (like advanced statistics) Bonus tip: Most universities have interdisciplinary research initiatives with funding. These are perfect opportunities to collaborate AND get paid for it.

This paper presents Northwestern University's initiatives to advance Collaborative AI in healthcare by developing resources and education to foster multidisciplinary collaboration across learning health systems. 1️⃣ Developed data pipelines and AI tools to democratize access to clinical data for research and practice. 2️⃣ Created educational resources, including AI/ML tutorials and the AI4H Clinic, to train a multidisciplinary AI-ready workforce. 3️⃣ Established governance frameworks with an Executive Steering Committee and Advisory Board to ensure ethical and strategic oversight. 4️⃣ Launched the Northwestern Medicine Healthcare AI Forum to enhance AI literacy among clinicians, researchers, and the community. 5️⃣ Built multimodal AI/ML tools integrating various healthcare data types, aiding in disease understanding and patient care improvements. 6️⃣ Initiated efforts to identify and address biases in healthcare AI models, promoting equity in AI-driven decisions. 7️⃣ Institutionalized these efforts into the Center for Collaborative AI in Healthcare, supporting further expansion and sustained impact. ✍🏻 Yuan Luo, Chengsheng Mao, Lazaro N. Sanchez-Pinto, Faraz S. Ahmad, Andrew Naidech, Luke Rasmussen, Jennifer A. Pacheco, Daniel Schneider, Leena B. Mithal, Scott Dresden, Kristi Holmes, PhD, Matthew Carson, Sanjiv J. Shah, Seema Khan, Susan Clare, Richard G. Wunderink, Huiping Liu, Theresa Walunas, Lee Cooper, Feng Yue, Firas Wehbe, Deyu Fang, David L., Michael Markl, Kelly Michelson, Susanna McColley, Marianne Green, Justin Starren, Ron Ackermann, Richard D'Aquila, James Adams, Donald Lloyd-Jones, Rex L. Chisholm, Abel Kho. Northwestern University resource and education development initiatives to advance collaborative artificial intelligence across the learning health system. Learning Health Systems. 2024. DOI: 10.1002/lrh2.10417

Are We Speaking the Same Language? 💡 Insights on Interdisciplinary Science Communication A few years ago, I was asked to help scientists communicate with… each other. This surprised me a bit because I usually train researchers to engage with the public, high school students etc. But why help scientists communicate among themselves? The answer lies in the rise of interdisciplinary research: Today’s complex problems require knowledge from many different research fields, making effective communication within interdisciplinary research projects crucial. Despite limited literature on this, I took on the challenge and have since conducted numerous rewarding workshops. This autumn I moderated a workshop for Carlsberg Foundation Semper Ardens Accelerate grant holders and in later summer we had a productive ITEASc workshop in Middelfart, where PhD and master’s students developed and pitched interdisciplinary research projects. Here are some key takeaways for successful interdisciplinary research and scicomm from the workshops: 📣 Have a clear aim: Well-motivated research questions are essential. 📣 Start a dialogue, not a monologue: Listen to your audience (in this case: your peers). 📣 Be transparent: Share your uncertainties. 📣 Train in a safe environment: Positive feedback culture is important. 📣 Be playful and reflective - but hold on to your core scientific skills and projects. 📣 Have patience: Developing a common language takes time. As we learned from ITEASc keynote speaker Andreas Roepstorff, interdisciplinary work might even slow down publication rates. But we need better papers, not more papers. We need to listen more and talk/write less! So… how do we train this in a workshop? 1) We start with fun and safe activities to spark conversation. It might look chaotic in photos, but it’s well thought out :-) 2) We aim for clear end products, like poster presentations. 3) Everyone literally writes down their core scientific skills on a piece of paper and presents it to the others. Three trivial points? Yes, perhaps. But highly efficient! AND it’s fun. What more could you ask for? Here what participants said when evaluating the workshops: “The workshop was really enlightening. It provided a toolbox that I will for sure use in the future to establish collaborations and submit multidisciplinary proposals with colleagues with different backgrounds!” “It was a friendly and validating environment.” “The ice breaker gave me the feeling that this was well organised, this was something new, and this was going to be fun. It did wonders for networking throughout the day.” “Amazing ideas in 3h. I can only imagine what could we do with months!” “It significantly shaped me to a better science communicator :)”   What are your experiences – good or bad – with Interdisciplinary Science Communication?  

𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐫𝐮𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 accounts for ~90% of cancer-related deaths—yet, it remains an under-prioritized challenge in drug development. Tackling this issue requires a multidisciplinary effort that bridges the gap between biology, computational sciences, physics, and clinical practice. A recent workshop, organized by Cancer Research UK, the Rosetrees Trust, and the UKRI Physics of Life Network, brought together experts from diverse fields to discuss strategies for overcoming resistance. Key takeaways included: ▪️ Understanding mechanisms of resistance ▪️ Developing new monitoring tools for early detection ▪️ Designing therapies that target drug-resistant cancer cells ▪️ Bridging the gap between basic research and clinical application There is much to learn from other fields like antimicrobial resistance or the COVID-19 pandemic, where data sharing and close collaboration have led to faster translation of research into treatments. How can we strengthen 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒑𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝒄𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒚? https://lnkd.in/dG3-8nTZ

A three-legged stool is only stable when all three legs are the same length. Transdisciplinary research is premised on exactly this: that natural scientists, social scientists and humanists, and communities with lived experience each bring something irreplaceable — and that their collaboration, structured equitably, produces knowledge and possibilities that none could generate alone. The field has made real progress on this framing. Look across today's funding calls — participatory research, co-production, place-based approaches, community-engaged science — and transdisciplinary language is everywhere. The methodology has been adopted. But one leg still tends to shorten. In many partnerships, one leg of the stool ends up in facilitation roles rather than co-design roles: building trust, running workshops, translating science for broader audiences. Essential work — but not equal work. Not the kind of work that shapes the research questions, drives the methods, or leads the publications. A partnership where any contributor is primarily serving the others is not a transdisciplinary partnership. It's a hierarchical wolf in sheep's clothing. And yet, even a truly equitable partnership isn't enough on its own — because the legs, however equal, don't hold themselves together. The seat does. Coordination infrastructure is what transforms three capable partners into a coherent program: shared governance, common frameworks, the steady relational and intellectual labor of keeping diverse expertise oriented toward the same goals. It rarely appears in the methods section. It almost never gets its own budget line. But remove it, and you don't have a partnership. You have three separate sticks. This is where the current moment becomes urgent. Even as transdisciplinary language proliferates in funding calls, the organizations that actually provide this backbone — stewarding multi-partner cohorts, facilitating knowledge exchange, sustaining the connective tissue between research and practice — are losing resources, reducing capacity, or disbanding entirely. We are expanding the methodology while defunding the mechanism. If transdisciplinary research is going to produce lasting, transformative contributions, we need to fund the seat, not just the legs. #Transdisciplinary #SystemsChange #CoDesign #MoreThanTheSum #CommunityEngagement #Coordination

Often desired, hard to come by: Interdisciplinary work in digital transformation. It is a challenge in research as well as in many areas of society. Meaningfully bringing together people that think and work differently, however, is key to tackling key challenges. In a recent paper, we reflected on how we build reciprocal bridges between information systems research and normative disciplines like ethics and law, albeit with fundamentally different research approaches. This intersection is particularly fruitful in thinking about how we can shape a society deeply impacted by digital transformation. The paper is titled "Interdisciplinary Boundary Spanning – Guidance for Collaboration Between the Disciplines of Information Systems, Law, and Ethics." Reflecting on our research journey at the intersection of these disciplines, we share our learnings. Defining boundary concepts that provide specific links into each discipline has helped us to co-create knowledge together. We summarize our learnings, for example, in a phenomenon-concept-value (PCV) framework. Building on a phenomenon of common interest, defining a value reference in the normative disciplines, and leveraging a specific concept from information systems research enables meaningful dialog and contributions in each discipline based on such boundary concepts. We are thankful to BISE Journal to let us share these reflections on #interdiscplinary #research. As the journal aptly put it, we hope this reflections are helpful for everyone working on #AI and #datagovernance, #techpolicy, and #responsibleinnovation. Many thanks for the fruitful collaboration to Christian Kurtz, Fabian Burmeister, Florian Wittner, Mattis Jacobs, Martin Semmann, Judith Simon, Ingrid Schirmer, and Wolfgang Schulz University of Hamburg Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow-Institut Supported by VolkswagenStiftung Link to the paper: https://lnkd.in/e9rrza8e

Interdisciplinary collaborations on campus should be more than a buzzword. Working on a college campus means being surrounded by brilliant minds from diverse fields. And having the opportunity to explore the synergies that exist between our areas of expertise. But turning ideas into action isn’t always easy. Why? 🛑 Silos: Faculty and departments operate in isolation, with little cross-communication. 🛑 Competing Priorities: Teaching loads, research demands, and budget constraints often take precedence. 🛑 Lack of Incentives: Many institutions still reward individual achievements over collaborative efforts. So, the big question is: How can college and department leaders break down these barriers and facilitate the great work of faculty?**👇 1️⃣ Host Interdisciplinary Networking Events: Faculty can connect through mixers, panels, or informal lunches. 2️⃣ Simplify Administrative Processes: Remove barriers like teaching load conflicts or grant-sharing complexities. 3️⃣ Provide Seed Grants: Fund small-scale interdisciplinary projects to jumpstart partnerships. 4️⃣ Recognize and Reward Collaboration: Include team efforts in performance reviews and tenure criteria. 5️⃣ Encourage Team-Teaching: Support faculty in designing and delivering cross-disciplinary courses. 6️⃣ Facilitate Cross-Departmental Communication: Share opportunities and success stories via newsletters or intranet platforms. 7️⃣ Develop Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Co-create programs blending diverse fields. 8️⃣ Host Cross-Disciplinary Speakers: Invite speakers who bridge fields to spark collaboration. 9️⃣ Create Cross-Unit Committees: Form committees with representatives from different departments to identify opportunities One thing is clear:  👉 Collaboration doesn’t happen on accident. It takes intentional leadership to break down barriers and build bridges between faculty. Collaboration isn’t without challenges, but neither is isolation. The question is how you choose to grow. ---------------------------- ♻️ Repost this to help other academic leaders.  💬 Follow for posts about higher education, leadership, & the arts. #LeadershipGoals #HigherEdSuccess #HigherEducation #departmentchairs #deans #programmanagers #academicleadership #LeadershipSkills #HigherEdLeadership #Collaboration #InterdisciplinaryResearch #FacultySupport #StudentSuccess #Innovation

With so many structural barriers, how can universities facilitate true interdisciplinary research? I had a stimulating discussion today with Sir Bashir M. Al-Hashimi CBE FREng FRS, VP for Research and Innovation at King's College London, to address this thorny issue. It is generally understood that the next generation of ground-breaking, world-changing scientific discoveries are most likely to come by combining a wide range of academic expertise through new, “interdisciplinary” science teams. But the barriers remain clear and high: universities are, by and large, structured in neat disciplinary silos, with departments (and their precious budgets) typically separated from each other, even with their own separate campus buildings; subject fields often come with their own research practices, languages and philosophies that are hard to penetrate by outsiders; and the academic journals, prizes and grants that bestow such prestige on scholars and drive their careers remain stubbornly locked into narrow disciplinary silos. At King's, interdisciplinarity seems to be baked into the infrastructure, and has been facilitated by things like the "King's Together" fund which has been available for the last decade to offer seed funding for colleagues' cross-disciplinary ideas. The university's latest AI+ initiative provides 20 academic fellowships in a move to develop "a critical mass of multidisciplinary research talent to accelerate the development and adoption of AI", says Sir Bashir. The scheme is focused on AI development and application across all disciplines, including health, bioscience, physical sciences, social sciences, security, humanities, business and law. Times Higher Education is in a deep partnership with Schmidt Sciences and Schmidt Science Fellows to support universities to harness the power of interdisciplinary research - cutting across disciplinary silos to push forward the boundaries of knowledge and to help solve some of the world's grand challenges. Much lipservice is paid to the notion of interdisciplinarity, but with Schmidt, THE wants to tease out what "good" looks like. That's why we created the Interdisciplinary Science Rankings: https://lnkd.in/eU-NUnaH And it is why we have just launched the Global Higher Education Interdisciplinary Network: https://lnkd.in/ergupxAC Watch this space.... Picture: King's fabulous, Grade II listed, Bush House building on Aldwych, former home of the BBC World Service. Thanks to Tom Foulkes for joining the fascinating conversations.