Federal agencies encourage more cross-disciplinary work

NIH and other groups are creating ways to foster more interdisciplinary research.

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

Single-discipline research is still the norm for most scientists. But over the past decade, with the encouragement of federal funding agencies, more have stepped out of their disciplinary boxes to collaborate with researchers from other fields.

Such cross-disciplinary research will accelerate understanding of the causes of illness and the development of the most effective treatments, says Norman B. Anderson, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR).

'We simply will not have a complete understanding of behavioral or biological processes by studying [biology and behavior] separately,' says Anderson. 'Health problems do not organize themselves to be congruent with university departments.'

One of OBSSR?s primary goals is to integrate a biobehavioral, interdisciplinary perspective across NIH, says Anderson.

'We are trying to move NIH away from the notion that what we do in the social and behavioral sciences is somehow separate and apart from what the molecular biologists and other biomedical scientists do,' he says. 'They need us and we need them.'

OBSSR has initiated several programs to help foster cross-discipliary research.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has also implemented several multidisciplinary funding programs over the past several years, and the behavioral and social sciences are central to many of those. 'Cross-disciplinary research is a perspective we continue to push,' says Bennett Bertenthal, PhD, assistant director of NSF?s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate. Such a perspective is one crucial way to increase funding for the social and behavioral sciences. 'Any field that remains isolated won?t compete,' he says.

Promoting dialogue

To help promote cross-disciplinary research, last year OBSSR initiated a grants program to fund educational workshops on conducting interdisciplinary research. The National Center for Research Resources, the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Dental Research co-sponsored the program, which has two goals:

? To encourage social, behavioral and biomedical scientists to learn each other?s methods, procedures and theoretical perspectives.

? To teach researchers how to develop cross-disciplinary collaborations and write quality interdisciplinary grant applications.

'These workshops provide people with the opportunity to get exposed to other disciplines and the tools to develop collaborations,' says Virginia Cain, PhD, special assistant to the director at OBSSR. The program funded 10 one- to two-week workshops that include:

? A five-day psychoneuro-immuunology (PNI) workshop at the University of Missouri?Kansas City, May 26?30, that will explore links between the disciplines that make up PNI, including psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology and immunology. Participants must register in teams of two, with one representing biomedicine and one representing behavioral science.

? A nine-day workshop, May 12?20, at the University of Connecticut to train researchers how to include cultural factors in their research designs and policy analyses.

? A five-day conference, Oct. 17?21, on 'Behavioral science and cancer genetics: new roles, new partners' organized by APA. The conference hopes to encourage collaboration between genetic researchers and behavioral scientists in the study of the individual, social and medical impact of genetic technology.

Along with funding the workshops, OBSSR is working with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York to help scientists move into multidisciplinary research by developing a 'how to' manual based on the experience of successful collaborations.

Over the next several months OBSSR and SSRC plan to form a working group of scientists who have conducted successful interdisciplinary research. And by networking with a wider group of colleagues, the working group will outline the obstacles to interdisciplinary research and recommend ways of overcoming them.

'We want the wider scientific community to benefit from the wisdom gained by people who have been doing this for a while,' says Anderson.

Funding mechanisms

It?s easy for funding agencies to predict that cross-disciplinary research is the wave of the future, says Bertenthal. But it?s harder to convince researchers to change the way they?ve done things for years. That?s why NSF has begun creating mechanisms to stimulate such research.

Last year, NSF funded the first phase of a large-scale cross-dis-ciplinary program in Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) with 28 grants in Learning and Intelligent Systems (LIS). NSF mandated that LIS grant proposals be multidisciplinary. Winning grants included teams of psychologists and computer scientists; chemists, linguists and psychologists; and cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and mathematicians.

Two other KDI initiatives?Knowledge Networking and New Computational Challenges?will also require highly interdisciplinary proposals. And by that, NSF doesn?t mean simply pulling in a researcher from another discipline as a figurehead, says Bertenthal.

'The most successful LIS applications didn?t restrict themselves to one university,' he says. 'The winners were teams who represented the very best from each field.'

Other NSF priority areas designed to be crossdisciplinary include Life and Earth?s Environment, which includes research on human dimensions of global change and the study of life in extreme environments; and Educating for the Future, which includes a new program on children and learning.

Special interdisciplinary funding mechanisms like these help ensure that proposals get properly reviewed, says Bertenthal. NSF insists on interdisciplinary grant proposals and sets up multidisciplinary review panels. Such a process allays a common obstacle cross-disciplinary researchers often face.

'One thing we have heard again and again is the need for more peer review committees that can handle the complexities of interdisciplinary research,' says Anderson. 'These proposals are not only hard to write, but they are hard to review. They should be reviewed by interdisciplinary thinkers?that is, people who understand multilevel causation and the nuances of cross-dis-ciplinary collaborations.'

The issue of peer review has been prominent as NIH prepares to reorganize the review of behavioral and social science research proposals, says Anderson. And OBSSR will work to ensure that NIH sets up panels capable of reviewing this research.