A new age of discovery

By Bennett Bertenthal, PhD
Assistant Director of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation

We are entering a new age of discovery where scientists are addressing increasingly complex problems that demand multidisciplinary methods and expertise. Paradoxically, it is still difficult to convince researchers to apply for grants to conduct multidisciplinary projects.

According to conventional wisdom, multidisciplinary research falls through the cracks of the review process. It represents a hybrid form of research that falls prey to 'double jeopardy': Typically, experts on review panels view multidisciplinary research as less advanced and less developed and, thus, less deserving of the scarce funds available for cutting-edge disciplinary research.

If funding agencies are sincere about promoting multidisci-plinary research, they must develop innovative strategies for soliciting, nurturing and reviewing this research. During the past few years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has done just that by initiating a number of new programs designed to promote multidisciplinary research.

One program of interest to behavioral scientists is Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI). This program represents a foundationwide competition to solicit innovative proposals designed to explore how learning and the acquisition of knowledge is enhanced through the use of computers and the Internet. KDI builds upon the highly successful Learning and Intelligent Systems (LIS) competition NSF initiated last year. LIS solicited and funded high-quality, multidisciplinary proposals for a number of reasons: Multidisciplinary panels of researchers centrally reviewed the proposals; panels considered proposals only if they included a multidisciplinary team of principal investigators; and NSF committed funds in advance of the competition so that multidisciplinary projects were assured funding.

Is it feasible?

Will new competitions actually promote more multidisciplinary research? Skeptics claim that multidisciplinary proposals are more apparent than real. In other words, researchers are not truly committed to working together, but are simply willing to form loose consortiums for the purpose of competing for new funds. It is also commonly believed that a strong team of disciplinary researchers can satisfy the multidisciplinary requirement of these competitions by simply adding researchers from other disciplines without demonstrating how they add value to the project.

I must admit that before I began my tenure at NSF, I shared many of these concerns. Yet, after observing the preliminary results of the new multidisciplinary competitions, I am much more sanguine about the process. The projects that NSF funded appear to be truly multidisciplinary, and principal investigators are already beginning to offer testimonials about the exciting new interactions that would not have emerged without this competition.

Although I now count myself as a true believer in the feasibility of multidisciplinary research, I am still realistic about the many challenges and risks associated with this process. Multidisciplinary projects represent a new way of conducting research that is somewhat foreign to the majority of scientists. An important goal for NSF is to develop strategies that bring researchers together for the purpose of creating new multidisciplinary research projects.

A risky initiative

One innovative approach was recently initiated on a small scale at NSF. In the recent National Science and Technology Council report, 'A Research Initiative for America?s Children for the 21st Century,' research on children?s learning was identified as critical to advancing our understanding of how children develop into productive citizens. When NSF reviewed its child-learning research portfolio, it found that it supports researchers from a number of different disciplines, including cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience, education and developmental psychology.

To stimulate and facilitate multidisciplinary interactions among these researchers, NSF will soon offer grant supplements to researchers already studying children and learning, for the specific purpose of convening planning meetings with one or more researchers from other disciplines. And we require participants to produce a white paper that synthesizes the points of intersection and common interests among the disciplines. Although it is difficult to predict the outcome of this risky investment, NSF hopes that these meetings will lead to new and highly innovative multidisciplinary projects.

It is the willingness of NSF to balance its portfolio of more conservative investments with some riskier investments that I believe bodes well for the future funding of multidisciplinary research.

'Science speaks' gives distinguished scientists the opportunity to present their views on timely or controversial issues in scientific psychology. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of APA.