ASU leads national trend of interdisciplinary research

Editors Note: The following excerpt is from an article titled "U.S. Agencies Look to Interdisciplinary Science," which appeared in the June 14 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. To read the article in its entirety, go to: (http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i40/40a02001.htm).

By Jeffrey Brainard

When biologists at ASU started a novel study in 1997 about how people in cities affect the local ecology, they looked outside their department for help.

That led to an unusually wide-ranging interdisciplinary effort (Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research project), which now involves more than 60 ecologists, economists, geographers, anthropologists and urban planners. After winning federal grants provided specifically for interdisciplinary research, the team has taken up questions such as how the diversity of birds in parks around Phoenix is shaped by the density and socioeconomic status of surrounding neighborhoods.

Collaborations involving scientists from different fields are relatively new in academe, and the collaborators at Arizona State are still feeling their way, says Stephen G. Fisher, a biology professor and one of the participants. But these partnerships are leading to more collaborations, a "snowball effect" that probably would not have happened without the federal grants, he says.

Such partnerships are proliferating in academe - and slowly changing the face of science - because they offer the best hope for answering some of the thorniest research subjects, including climate change, biodiversity and cancer.

After years in which federal research funds focused largely on disciplinary-specific projects, government agencies are increasingly encouraging collaboration and appear to be providing a growing amount of money for interdisciplinary research. And universities, especially those such as Arizona State, which have few individual disciplines at the top of the research food chain, see the interdisciplinary route as a way to diversify and distinguish themselves.

At the same time, the push for more interdisciplinary research is experiencing growing pains. Researchers and federal officials say the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have struggled to evaluate proposals that cross disciplinary lines. And leaders of university departments, most of which are focused on a single discipline, have grappled with how to allocate tenure, office space and other resources to faculty members whose work spans multiple fields.

"You can't go to a scientific meeting without people talking about the importance of [interdisciplinary research] in some of the most important scientific problems," says Thomas A. Kalil, who has helped to develop interdisciplinary research projects as a special assistant to the chancellor at the University of California at Berkeley. But "there has not been nearly enough attention paid to what the obstacles are, the payoff and what can be done at the campus and federal levels to promote it."
A Worthwhile Debate

Regardless of the obstacles, some university leaders support interdisciplinary research as a strategy for spurring growth, even if that means confronting faculty members' reluctance to change.

Arizona State is among several younger research universities that have developed this focus. Its biology department became especially active in interdisciplinary research more than a decade ago. The department has received a cluster of federal grants to support such projects, which helped to triple its total research funds to $9 million from 1990 to 2000 while the number of faculty members remained roughly level, says James P. Collins, the chairman. (The support fell to about $5 million in 2001; he attributes that to a very good year in 2000, when several especially large grants were won.)

The push for interdisciplinary grants was not immediately embraced by members of the department who were not used to working in groups. Whether to do more interdisciplinary research "is a worthwhile debate that's still going on" within the department, Collins says. "You don't really resolve it. You just keep moving around it and do the best you can."

Michael C. Moore, a biology professor at Arizona State, was among the skeptics. In part, he was concerned that collaborative research looked like an either-or proposition: If such work produced few results, would it damage his career?

He has since found a happy medium working with a group of 70 scientists from his and other departments, while continuing his own research on the effects of hormones on the brains and the behavior of wild animals. The group is studying the physiological and emotional aspects of stress, which is suspected as a contributing factor in a variety of diseases. That work has not yet attracted federal financing, but Moore and his colleagues hope that it will.

"Before I got involved, I didn't see how I could afford the risk" of participation, Moore says. But in a collaborative project, "you can take this risk as a group, and then you don't have to remake your career in one fell swoop."