Open Science and Interdisciplinary Studies

Have you heard of openproblems.bio? 🧬 It's kind of like Kaggle for single-cell biology. And it's a brilliant model of how the ML and bioinformatics communities collaborate. Single-cell analysis sits at a fascinating intersection: massive, tabular datasets meet cutting-edge ML meets the messy reality of biology. But here's the challenge: ML researchers love Jupyter notebooks, while biology demands robust, reproducible pipelines for processing data. Different tools, different cultures. OpenProblems.bio bridges this gap brilliantly. It transforms core single-cell challenges into living, community-run benchmarks where anyone can: ✅ Submit methods in Python or R (no pipeline expertise needed) ✅ Compare results fairly with standardized datasets and metrics ✅ Access everything openly, including published results and methods The secret sauce? A powerful three-part ecosystem: * Viash converts scripts into reproducible pipeline components * Nextflow orchestrates complex workflows * Seqera provides the platform for elastic cloud execution on AWS What excites me most: this is **FAIR open science done right** Complete transparency, version control, quality checks built in, and a framework that welcomes contributions from both communities without forcing either to abandon their tools. Tasks range from dimensionality reduction to perturbation prediction, with new benchmarks continually added by the community. If you're working in computational biology or ML for life sciences, this is infrastructure worth knowing about. The future of biomedical AI needs exactly this kind of collaborative, rigorous foundation. Thanks to Robrecht Cannoodt and the openproblems.bio community for collaborating on the blog: https://lnkd.in/gpNJNd2r #Bioinformatics #MachineLearning #SingleCell #OpenScience #Benchmarking

Collaboration across disciplines sounds intuitive. In practice, it is anything but simple. A recent qualitative study examining how artists, scientists and technologists work together shows that interdisciplinary collaboration about navigating fundamentally different ways of thinking, creating and validating knowledge. Participants describe collaboration as a process of “de-disciplining” themselves. Established methods, norms and hierarchies need to be temporarily suspended to make room for alternative perspectives. This is where friction emerges. Scientists may prioritise rigour and reproducibility, artists ambiguity and exploration, technologists functionality and application. What makes collaboration work is not alignment, but negotiation. Shared understanding develops through iteration, translation and, often, discomfort. Trust becomes a central variable, not only between individuals but between epistemologies. The study also points to structural constraints. Institutional settings, funding models and evaluation criteria still favour disciplinary outputs. This creates a paradox where interdisciplinary work is encouraged rhetorically but remains difficult to sustain in practice. Authors: Zeynep Birsel, Ellen Loots, Lénia Marques

Here’s an uncomfortable truth- innovation doesn’t fail because of bad ideas, but because of good ideas kept in isolation. In science, I’ve seen brilliant minds spend months chasing a hypothesis, only to realize that what they needed wasn’t another experiment, but another perspective. A few years ago, I was part of a project where our lab was trying to improve a compound’s stability profile. We had chemistry expertise, models, and endless iterations, but zero progress. It wasn’t until we brought in a data scientist to analyze our reaction variables that we spotted the real issue: an overlooked pattern in solvent interaction. Within a week, what seemed impossible was solved. That experience taught me something simple yet powerful, asking for help early is not a sign of weakness; it’s a strategy. When a chemist teams up with a data scientist, or a clinician collaborates with a behavioral expert, magic happens. Problems shrink. Pathways open. Innovation accelerates. The smartest innovators aren’t the ones who know it all. They’re the ones who know when to reach out. 💡 Takeaway: Collaboration is not a phase of innovation, it’s the foundation of it.  If you’re leading a research or innovation project, don’t wait until you’re stuck. Bring diverse minds into the room early. The breakthrough you’re chasing might already exist, in someone else’s insight. #InnovationLeadership #Collaboration #ScientificInnovation #ResearchAndDevelopment #InterdisciplinaryScience #PharmaInnovation #OpenInnovation #CollaborationOverCompetition #InnovationMindset #ScientificResearch #TeamScience #RAndD #InnovationStrategy #ScientificThinking

Check out this important new #openaccess #research #study on #Protein #quality and #environmental #impacts of #soy-based #meat #alternatives", investigating from the soybean to the gut, how protein digestibility and environmental impacts can vary during and depending on food processing when producing soy based meat analogues. This work was an #interdisciplinary #collaboration between #nutritional experts from Agroscope and Fernfachhochschule Schweiz, food #processing experts from ETH Zürich and Berner Fachhochschule BFH , and #sustainability experts from ETH Zürich, enabling a comprehensive nutritional life cycle assessment. This approach should more often serve as a foundation for responsible decision-making. Let’s continue to collaborate across disciplines to shape the foods of the future. This interdisciplinary study was conducted by Laila Hammer and Corina Sägesser and all our collaborators: Armin Siegrist, Moritz Goessler, Charlotte Egger, Reto Portmann, Moritz Müller, Mario Arcari, Christoph Denkel, Pornpimol Scheuchzer, Joseph Dumpler, and Diego Moretti #openaccess #research #article #link: https://lnkd.in/gqhWsGkm #physiology #health #nutrition #food #processing #sustainable #protein This study was funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation Practice to Science Program (Nr. PT00P3 199073). We would like to thank the group Ingredients in the Department of Method Development and Analytics at Agroscope for conducting the chemical analyses (fat, nitrogen, and dry matter), Jérôme Widmer and Lorin Müller for their work on the SDS-PAGE analysis, and Alida Melse-Boonstra for her support in the project planning and for proof-reading the manuscript; and Ashley Green for her advice and support of the LCA, specifically the supervision of Moritz Goessler's Master's thesis.

Human dynamics research has evolved rapidly over the past decade, driven by interdisciplinary collaboration and technological innovation. Our new open-access opinion paper explores how GIScience, computational science, and design science are coming together to tackle major challenges like urban sustainability, disaster response, and epidemics. Check out “Advancing Translational Human Dynamics Research: Bridging Space, Mind, and Computational Urban Science in the Era of GeoAI”, co-authored with leading experts in Urban AI and GeoAI! Bin Jiang Tao C. Ming-Hsiang Tsou Di Zhu https://lnkd.in/gMyh6gSW

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.

New preprint out: "Disciplined pluralism in cognitive neuroscience" This piece is special. It began when a young, inquisitive researcher—who found one of my earlier papers—reached out with sharp questions. I warned them that challenging grand frameworks can be messy. They wrote anyway. We teamed up. And we tried to do a little house-cleaning. What's inside We argue for disciplined pluralism over one-size-fits-all theories. We propose clear criteria for useful frameworks: cross-level portability, genuine risk of refutation, instrument guidance, constraining power, and demonstrable value-add. We highlight recent adversarial tests (e.g., GWT vs IIT) as a model for how competing theories can be compared without chasing a single "winner." Why it matters Too many umbrella frameworks travel well rhetorically but struggle when it comes to measurement, prediction, and intervention. We offer a practical way to sort helpful from hand-wavy—so our field can spend more time discovering and less time declaring. I'm proud of my co-author's courage and curiosity. Science needs that energy. Preprint: https://lnkd.in/g6bSNYEm Authors: Troy A. Kervin & Madhur Mangalam Comments, critiques, and adversarial tests welcome. #Neuroscience #CognitiveScience #Theory #Pluralism #OpenScience #Preprint #Methods #Falsification #ResearchCulture

Happy to announce the publication of my latest article from Lindenwood University College of Arts and Humanities "The Role of Collaborative Authorship in Decentered Research Innovation" in  Information, Medium, and Society: Journal of Publishing Studies. As we pass the inflection point in this age of AI, it's clear that no one discipline can solve the wicked problems facing our world. Now more than ever, we need to break down academic silos and embrace interdisciplinary collaboration. Access the article here:  https://lnkd.in/gfpyU5FF I'm grateful to my 70+ co-authors across multiple institutions and disciplines - from computer science to psychology to sociology - for their invaluable contributions. Together we've shown how a decentered, collaborative research model can reengage faculty, provide students with critical skills, and accelerate innovation. The future is interdisciplinary! #interdisciplinary #collaboration #innovation #socialsciences #STEM #researchculture #academia