Wave Of The Future: Interdisciplinary Collaborations

As science increasingly becomes more complex, interdisciplinary research at many academic institutions is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception, many scientists and ad- ministrators say. At the same time, observers warn, there are institutional roadblocks to such collaborations. Most universities remain bound by traditional departmental structures for administrative and curricular purposes, including peer review, tenure, and promotion. Funding agencies, too, have been structurally allied to a discipline-specific academic model, agency officials acknowledge, and have found it difficult to handle collaborative research proposals. But recent government initiatives have begun to address and support this trend in investigation_and if schools don't follow suit, they may find top scientists passing them by, researchers warn. WAVE OF THE FUTURE: Duke's Mark Rodger says the institutions that will succeed are those that can reorganize themselves. "The best institutions of the future are those that can reorganize themselves to address scientific and educational questions in an interdisciplinary manner," declares pediatrician and cardiologist Mark C. Rogers, vice chancellor for health affairs at Duke University. "The institutions that will have difficulty are those that keep the same rigid structure that prevents pollination among disciplines." Institutions are using different strategies to foster these relationships. Some establish interdisciplinary laboratories, centers, or institutes through special programs. Others construct separate buildings wholly dedicated to cross- disciplinary work. Still others sponsor seed grant programs to spur unconventional partnerships among faculty. Many life scientists point out that the widespread use of new molecular techniques has continued to blur the lines among many disciplines. "Geneticists use molecular biology and chemistry techniques, chemists use molecular biology and genetics, plant pathologists need to know molecular biology to study disease resistance," points out plant biochemist Doug Randall at the University of Missouri. Entomologist Jack Schultz of Pennsylvania State University contends that "the kind of questions that people are trying to answer can no longer be answered simply with the kind of disciplinary training most people get with a Ph.D. You have to collaborate and speak other languages." Schultz is codirector of a new Penn State program, backed by the National Science Foundation, to train students across several fields such as ecology, plant physiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology in studying how plants interact with their environment. In fact, whole new fields have arisen in recent years at the interface of disciplinary boundaries. At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, geneticists, computer scientists, and developmental biologists pioneered the first mammalian genetic database and helped establish the young field of bioinformatics, integrating biology and information science. Biomedical engineering is another burgeoning area, stemming from increasing collaborations among biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, and physicians. Nonetheless, for many institutions, it remains a struggle to promote interdisciplinary research on a wide scale. "One of the most difficult problems is that each faculty member has a research trajectory, a set of problems that they are pursuing. It's not easy to leave that path," says Michael Crow, vice provost of Columbia University. "Columbia is organized on a disciplinary basis. It's built around a model of strong entrepreneurial activity. The model for success here is the strong individual, not necessarily the strong group." Another roadblock is income. In some departments, a researcher's salary may come primarily from outside funding sources. "The time they're spending thinking how to collaborate with other fields is time away from finding ways to support their own departmental research," according to Crow. He believes that most investigators don't "have the means to initiate relationships between widely separated fields. We're using centers, seed grants, joint seminars it's still a tough sell." Similarly, when ophthalmologist David Epstein tried to collaborate with scientists at Harvard University, he found no takers. Epstein, who was at the Harvard ophthalmology department at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, wanted to investigate the cell physiology of glaucoma. "It's a diffuse system at Harvard," he says. "They do wonderful, world-class work, but physically the hospital is located across town from the university, and I found it was difficult to arrange these types of collaborations." Epstein, who now heads the ophthalmology department at Duke University, terms the Harvard atmosphere "very competitive." Three years earlier, at the University of California, San Francisco, he found that basic scientists there were "happy to share what they were doing," he recalls, "but in terms of establishing a program for sharing resources postdocs, scientists working at the basic sciences as well as with clinicians there wasn't a mechanism for this." Now at Duke, where he's been "impressed with the degree of collegiality and sharing," he's working with scientists in attempting to find a potential link between an Alzheimer's disease gene and glaucoma. "Talking to colleagues around the country, the [UC-San Francisco] situation may be more the norm," he says. "[As a clinician,] you need to integrate with the basic sciences for ophthalmology to be able to make inroads in curing disease, as well as keep up to date." Keith Yamamoto, chairman of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UC-San Francisco, doesn't deny that collaborations among clinical and basic scientists may be the toughest to develop. However, he says, his institution is trying to do this in a number of ways. As an example, he cites the Program in Biological Sciences, which supports graduate education and involves faculty from several areas, such as psychiatry, ophthalmology, anatomy, and biochemistry. "I'm sure it's not the case that everyone comes here and finds a match for research collaborations," Yamamoto acknowledges, "but on balance I think it's a wonderful environment for research cooperation." Many scientists complain that interdisciplinary research collaborations can be a political nightmare. Competition for scarce resources and difficulty in gaining proper recognition are just two obstacles. "Some places make it tough when the resources are divided up among academic units on campus," Schultz comments. "At Penn State, all the money is given to my department and divided from there." Spending time on a project in a department other than one's own may not gain much encouragement from the researcher's home department, he notes. Publishing, tenure, and promotion may also be complicated through collaboration, he says. "You get more credit toward tenure if you're the only author on a paper," he points out. "When you're evaluated for promotion and tenure, some institutions discount your publications and grants by the number of authors. Most places want to hire an assistant professor who establishes an independent reputation on publications and grants so that when tenure time comes around, there isn't a difficult decision. "Most committees that evaluate this don't know a person well enough to be able to tell, and faculty letters don't always help." As a result, many academic administrators advise, until young faculty have established a track record within a discipline, publications should be in that discipline and not outside or shared by too many colleagues. In the face of such academic resistance, industry and federal funding offices are pushing interdisciplinary cooperation, observers note. "More and more federal funding agencies, such as the NSF, the Department of Energy, as well as private industries insist upon it," says Robert Shelton, vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Davis. "Many of them want a clustering of expertise at a single institution to solve problems." As a result, he observes, in the last five years universities have been more aggressive in encouraging disciplines to work together. Shelton's campus uses "organized research units" (ORUs) to sidestep disciplinary limits. ORUs are interdisciplinary, with unit members working together to attract outside funding. "An ORU in polymers, for example, brings people from agriculture and textiles alongside chemists and chemical engineers," he explains. The University of California system also uses ORUs, according to Yamamoto. But funding agencies acknowledge that they are still struggling to find the most efficient method to review interdisciplinary proposals. "When proposals don't fit into traditional categories, they're always difficult to review," says Tom Weber, executive officer for NSF's Math and Physical Sciences (MPS) directorate. "The NSF reflects university disciplinary structure. This is one type of research that isn't handled easily by traditional discipline divisions." To address this problem, NSF has established a new Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) in the MPS directorate. It will siphon off roughly $5 million from each of MPS's five divisions for multidisciplinary work. "No proposals will be sent directly to the OMA. A proposal that spans chemistry and physics would go to the appropriate divisions," explains Weber, who is acting OMA director. "Then the OMA might split funding with one or more divisions. It's not really anything new; it's an attempt to shepherd these things through more easily." Anthony Demsey, acting deputy director of the National Institutes of Health's Division of Research Grants, notes that study sections that review grants in a particular field are made up of experts in that field. Multidisciplinary proposals are handled similarly; reviewers reflect the diversity of disciplines represented in the proposal. "It's not uncommon to bring in ad hoc expertise," he notes. "There's a spectrum of mechanisms to deal with it, from adding special experts to a standing study section to an entire new panel to review several applications in a particular [interdisciplinary] area." While academe has only in the last decade or so begun to embrace the interdisciplinary approach, industry has promoted such collaborations as part of its ethos, according to Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A focus on short-term problem- solving has made this a priority. "Industry fosters interdisciplinary approaches," says Narayanamurti, who came to UC-Santa Barbara after stints at Sandia National Laboratories and AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. "It combines many different disciplines to solve problems." The University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) is attempting to nurture this approach. Structural and molecular biologists, protein chemists, and marine scientists work beside computer scientists and chemical engineers to create new biomaterials and vaccines, perfect bioimaging techniques, and study the intricacies of diseases, according to UMBI director Rita Colwell. Collaborative institutions such as UMBI are vital to future success in research, says Colwell, who is also president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "The government is sending strong signals that scientists will have to find more efficient ways to work. The NSF budget may be cut by 20 percent, and the NIH may face a $2.7 billion reduction. Research budgets will not be rising." Some institutions have built campus centers to bring science and engineering disciplines physically together (K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, Dec. 12, 1994, page 1). At the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, 14 different departments are organized under three research themes: Biological Intelligence, Molecular and Electronic Nanostructures, and Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction. According to Beckman Institute director Jiri Jonas, "going beyond disciplinary bounds is crucial for doing science today, and multidisciplinary work requires laboratories and collaborating scientists physically located near each other." Beckman neuroscientist William Greenough, a psychology professor in the Biological Intelligence theme, and his team study how the nervous system processes and stores information. "Unlike traditional departments that have all physiologists, all biochemists, all psychologists in the same place, we have an interdisciplinary group of researchers from analytical chemistry, cell biology, biochemistry, physiology, psychology, and engineering." The University of Oregon in Eugene had similar intentions when it created a science complex several years ago. According to provost John Moseley, who played a major role in the center's design, the complex was constructed to allow faculty members to be located within their department and institute, an important feature, since most Oregon science faculty had interdisciplinary research institute affiliations along with departmental appointments. Four new buildings were constructed, three of which connected to each other or to existing buildings. "It's worked extremely well," Moseley says. "Faculty continue to be located within their departments, and we have plenty of open space for meetings and spontaneous get-togethers." At some institutions, small size may drive interdisciplinary endeavors. Take Brandeis University, a school of about 3,000 students. Scarce resources mean an emphasis on sharing, according to Greg Petsko, director of its Rosenstiel Center, one of several interdisciplinary centers on campus. At Rosenstiel, 16 faculty from several departments share offices, laboratories, equipment, and meeting rooms. "Departments aren't segregated; some floors have people from different research groups together," which encourages collaborations, Petsko notes. Physicists at Rosenstiel, for example, are pairing with biologists to develop faster, more sensitive X-ray detectors, which will allow structural biologists to image macromolecules at work in real time. Some researchers see stifling limitations within disciplines, as well. Petsko left MIT five years ago because he disliked the "Balkanization" of the chemistry department into specialty areas such as organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry. "I think it's bad for chemistry. Ninety percent of institutions have these horrible divisional structures," he says. "The most exciting areas of chemistry are where disciplines rub together. Things are moving so fast that the lines of disciplines are blurring." Steven Benowitz is a science writer at Penn State's Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #13, pg.1, June 26, 1995) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)

Wave Of The Future: Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of