The establishment of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in the late 1980s helped launch a new spirit of scholarly pursuits at Illinois and across the country based on interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems, and to understanding some of the most fundamental and foundational questions in science. Today, that interdisciplinary spirit and approach resonates all across campus, not only within our 10 interdisciplinary research institutes, but throughout the many unique and innovative centers and programs that connect faculty, students, and researchers between academic units, with our interdisciplinary research units, and with external community, industry, clinical, government, and academic partners.
Einstein is famously quoted for saying “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Many institutions, whether academic, industry, or governmental, offer interdisciplinary programs and approaches to solving problems, recognizing that the world’s problems are not divided so neatly into categories. Yet, traditional disciplinary or categorical structures in many of our academic institutions remain.
Clearly there is value in interdisciplinary research and approaches, and strong disciplines are an essential foundation to the interdisciplinarity we seek. Equally valuable is the interdisciplinary education that is required to equip future scientists, engineers, humanists, scholars, and workforce with the team-science, critical-thinking skills to tackle the problems to be solved. While these skills and knowledge are rooted in strong disciplinary foundations, they also require training and abilities to communicate across disciplinary boundaries, to understand fundamental differences in the ways that disciplines conceptualize problems, formulate solutions, approach and accomplish goals, and to manage the differences in disciplinary climates and cultures, professions, and populations.
Even at Illinois, with our interdisciplinary research units (IRUs) and strong interdisciplinary culture, we lack a truly innovative model for driving interdisciplinary problem solving that spans not only the research enterprise, but also education, engagement, and translation. For me, this became increasingly evident during our regular meetings and discussions for the Chancellor’s Health Innovation Visioning Committee, which was charged to develop a new model for technology-inspired health innovation, research, and education. There are problems to be solved in human health, spanning the wide range from individualized personalized physical and mental health and well-being, to public health and the care for our growing aging population, to rural health and agricultural practices that are needed to feed the world, to environmental and planet health to address our changing climate and the habitability of Earth, and to global health – how we are all connected by our shared humanity, despite the differences we see.
Our students see these problems and are often passionate about committing their lives and careers to solving them, but we need to provide them with stronger interdisciplinary research, education, engagement, and translation mechanisms and pathways. To start, the Health Innovation Visioning Committee conceived of a new education model not unlike the Individualized Plans of Study (IPS) in LAS, and the CS+X model in the Grainger College of Engineering, both of which cross disciplinary boundaries. We imagine an educational model where students define the problem they want to solve, the one they are most passionate about – their mission. Their mission defines their degree, not their discipline, but is supported by strong disciplinary fundamentals combined in interdisciplinary and experiential ways to prepare them with the knowledge, skills, and experience to graduate and launch what will become their lifelong pursuit to change the world. As educators and professionals in higher education, we can think of no better outcome or success for our students and for our society.
At the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, interdisciplinarity is inherent in our name and in our vision and mission. IHSI is here to identify, build, and support new research endeavors in interdisciplinary ways. We connect in order to collaborate, and we drive interdisciplinarity to inspire. But we can do better. Collectively as a campus, we need to push our interdisciplinary boundaries even further, beyond research and into education, service, translation, and everything else that we do. There will always be problems to solve, but only through change will we have the new and needed level of thinking by which to solve them.