Talking leadership: Thomas Hofmann on cultivating an ‘interdisciplinary mindset’

Browse the full results of the Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2025

There is growing consensus that the world’s most pressing problems can be solved only by big-picture research that draws on a variety of disciplines. But how can universities foster such interdisciplinary working?

It is a question that Thomas Hofmann, president of Germany’s Technical University of Munich (TUM) – which ranks 12th globally and second in Europe in the inaugural Times Higher Education Interdisciplinary Science Rankings, published today — has been seeking to address since taking the helm of the institution in 2019.

Between 2020 and 2023, Hofmann rearranged the organisational structure from siloed disciplinary units into seven larger schools. The idea was to “implement a high degree of interdisciplinarity in those schools” without sacrificing their “strong disciplinary foundations”. As part of a matrix structure, six integrative research centres were established, which “cut across these schools like a connective tissue”, Hofmann says. One of those centres, for example, is on robotics and machine intelligence and comprises academics from computer science, engineering, natural sciences and medicine as well as social sciences.

As well as overhauling the formal structure, in 2020 the university created “more fluid ‘innovation networks’”.

“It’s not an institute or a centre or anything like that. It’s a network of experts,” says Hofmann, adding that a grouping usually comprises about 10 principal investigators as well as PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. “The idea is to support interdisciplinary high-risk, high-gain projects” on emerging topics at an early stage before the PIs are able to apply for grants. The projects are funded by the university for four years, and the hope is that they will subsequently win larger amounts of external funding. “It’s like a germ cell for new ideas and creative work at the intersection of disciplines, on risky topics,” he explains.

So what have been the biggest challenges involved in moving to a more interdisciplinary culture? “It’s the people,” Hofmann says, although he quickly adds that there has always been “a group of people who are really fascinated about the idea and fully convinced that the real innovations will happen at the intersections”. And he believes that more and more academics are embracing this frame of mind. Over the past five years, TUM has appointed more than 220 new professors, many of whom think along those lines, which “helped change the culture even more quickly” than would have been possible otherwise.

But Hofmann also has a secret weapon when it comes to adopting new ideas: students. Students have been a big driver of interdisciplinary working, he says, because they are more naturally inclined than academics to work across disciplines. Today’s “students have a truly visionary mindset. They see problems very differently to how we [learned] when we were students.”

To harness this approach, TUM has created teaching formats that encourage interdisciplinarity, such as project weeks bringing together groups across disciplines to “work on quite tough challenges”. Meanwhile, there are student-run clubs that are focused on social or technological challenges. They range from 20 to 400 members, and include students from all sorts of backgrounds. The groups are supported by professors, providing another avenue for scholars from different disciplines to interact and spark potential research collaborations.

Students push the university to go in new directions, Hofmann says. “I don’t see the students just as students whom we teach and who receive new knowledge from us…Students get a lot of inspiration from friends studying somewhere else, and they come in with fresh ideas,” he says.

“I encourage them also to bring ideas into the university, to further develop the university, so that the students also sit in the driver’s seat. They’re not just a passive customer – they’re an active change agent.”

To learn what they are thinking and what ideas they have, Hofmann established a president’s lunch, which he holds with 10 students from different disciplines every two months. “Usually I tell them: there are only two rules. The first rule is they can ask me what they want, and I can ask them what I want; and the second rule is, there’s no president.”

Does it work? “After five minutes, it’s just an open and truly inspirational atmosphere enabling an exchange on eye level.” The students are demanding, he says. “They say, Stanford is doing that, and Oxford is doing that…sometimes we are aligned in thinking, and sometimes we disagree.”

While Hofmann has initiated several strategies to encourage more interdisciplinary working, he acknowledges that there remain “many hurdles” to overcome. One is “the currency of scientific performance”: individual disciplines have clear measures of success, whereas interdisciplinary work is less likely to be rewarded.

“What holds back some professors from going into collaboration is they say: ‘If I only do this, I lose my performance measures in my discipline. This discussion happens quite a lot,” he says, adding that university leaders “need to have a shift in our criteria, how we evaluate success”.

But Hofmann warns that universities must not lose deep enquiry in narrow disciplines in the process of fostering more collaboration across fields.

“We do not need generalists,” he cautions. “We still need this disciplinary strength…but it needs disciplinary scientists with a large interdisciplinary mindset.”