‘Jealousy’ and ‘lack of community’ hit interdisciplinary research

Barriers to building multidisciplinary research in universities can include “jealous” academics and a lack of incentives or community, the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit has heard.

The summit, hosted by the University of Sydney, is on the theme of “collaborating for greatness in a multidisciplinary world”.

While there is often talk about research that works across disciplines being the solution to many of the world’s biggest challenges, a session on “building multidisciplinary research from the ground up” heard there are plenty of barriers within universities.

Shearer West, the University of Nottingham vice-chancellor, related her university’s experience of creating six “beacons of excellence”, in global challenges including ensuring sustainable food supplies, ending slavery and developing greener transport systems.

“We were able to bring on early career [researchers] into new multidisciplinary spaces, we cemented a number of our industrial partnerships and we had spin-outs and various other outcomes we might not have had otherwise,” Professor West told the event.

There were other “concrete outcomes”, such as the precision imaging beacon leading on to Nottingham winning £29 million of funding to create the UK’s most powerful Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, “on the basis of having this new capability”.

“That was all great. What didn’t work…there was a lack of fit [in] these beacons with the structures, governance and financial arrangements for a university,” Professor West continued.

Another problem was “internal politics”, she added. “There were some very jealous people in the university who felt like this investment was ‘coming to them, not to us’. And that created some really bad feeling, unfortunately.”

Professor West summed up on multidisciplinary research: “It’s risky; you have to hold your nerve for outcomes. It’s worth doing; but you also have to expect and tolerate failure.”

Megan Kenna, founding executive director of Schmidt Science Fellows, which identifies outstanding PhD graduates and provides them with postdoctoral fellowships to mount a “significant disciplinary pivot from their PhD topic”, told the event: “We heard from a lot of our fellows there really were a lot of barriers to doing this kind of problem-focused interdisciplinary science when they went back into academia and other areas.”

Schmidt Science Fellows and THE recently announced they would be partnering with the aim of developing a new ranking measuring universities’ contribution to interdisciplinary science.

One barrier the organisation’s fellows highlighted was “a lack of high-risk, high-reward funding for interdisciplinary science”, said Dr Kenna.

Another problem raised, she added, was a “lack of community – actually there’s something really important about having other people who are approaching things in similar ways to you and reading the same journals and having conversations with them”.

That showed “building a community of people who are trying to do science differently is a really important factor”, she continued.

And Dr Kenna also said fellows found “the incentive structure [in universities] really disincentivised interdisciplinarity – that in fact if you were first author on papers, or publishing in the journals you were expected to publish in…you were more likely to be promoted”.

Professor West suggested the consensus on the panel was that “incentives rather than shot-gun marriages is the [right] top-down tactic”.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com