Traditional academic barriers are coming down in favor of collaborative efforts that connect experts from all corners of the U.

An urban planner, epidemiologist, and kinesiologist walk into a lab. ... What may have sounded like the start of a joke more than a decade ago is now the beginning of life-changing research. Experts from across the University are working together on a National Institutes of Health-sponsored project called Transdisciplinary Research on Energetics and Cancer -- that examines psychological, social, genetic, and environmental factors tied to cancer and obesity.

Ann Forsyth, the director of the Metropolitan Design Center and Dayton Hudson Land-Grant Chair in Urban Design, is part of a team looking at childhood obesity through the lenses of food intake and physical activity. "Our project goes from someone in kinesiology who is taking blood in order to study genetic material, through nutritionists who are going into people's homes and looking in their cupboards, through my work looking at street patterns, parks, and the pedestrian infrastructure," she explained.

What's it like for an architect to work with all those scientists? "The collaboration has been useful in framing the work I do," according to Forsyth. For example, research that she previously would have labeled economic efficiency can be recast as a public health project, making it more attractive to research grantors. "Human health is very compelling to people, so this relationship helps them understand that what we do in my field is important." She's so inspired by the potential that she plans to do a degree in public health during a future sabbatical.

History of discipline

The term interdisciplinary comes up often in discussions of the U's goal to become a top research institution. In last year's State of the U address, President Bruininks remarked, "The big questions that confront society in the 21st century require interdisciplinary teams of researchers who are strong in their disciplines but able to cross boundaries." He also set a goal to establish the U as "a national leader in the conversation on interdisciplinarity and its best practices."

While approaching a topic from multiple disciplines isn't new, weaving it into academic culture can be challenging because institutions are up against more than a century of practice. "The notion that the world could be understood from different disciplinary perspectives, each partitioned off from the others, was a 19th¿century creation," said history professor Eric Weitz.

Weitz believes interdisciplinarity has become more prevalent in the last decade because of multidiscipline developments in the sciences, such as the way genetics transformed our understanding of the human body. Another reason for its rise is the persistence of big problems -- poverty, the environment, ethnic and national conflict, for example -- that require new ways of thinking.

Not a Panacea

Even though Forsyth and Weitz endorse interdisciplinarity and have benefited from it, both are quick to warn of its pitfalls. "Interdisciplinarity can't be mush," said Weitz. "It's not throwing everything into one pot and stirring it all up."

"An interdisciplinary approach can definitely help people see new data and develop new theories, but it's not a panacea," added Forsyth. Recognizing that interdisciplnarity and the evolution of disciplines required a strategy, the U organized a task force to recommend how these things should be implemented. Recommendations included the establishment of a high-profile institute to support interdisciplinary scholarship, faculty and grad student exchanges between departments and programs, and assessment of new and existing University centers to ensure their intellectual vibrancy.

Forsyth sat on the task force. "It was really about innovation. Our premise was that a lot of innovative work was threatening to existing fields by pushing them beyond where they are and undermining the status quo," she said. "We tried to come up with ways that not only fostered interdisciplinary work but also disciplinary change, because some really important evolutions come from within a discipline."

This article is reprinted from the spring 2007 issue of Legacy, a quarterly publication for U of M donors and friends published by the University of Minnesota Foundation.