“Greater exposure to interdisciplinarity—especially for science majors—is associated with increased earnings after college graduation.” This is one of the conclusions of an article on interdisciplinary education by Han et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published in 2023.
Researchers are human too, though possibly more curious than many. So why do many recognise that interdisciplinary research is valuable, but don’t want to do it? What are the barriers to doing this work?
One of the fun things I have to do in my job is find ways to increase collaborative research between IMSE and commercial companies. This is complicated. Research is risky, it’s expensive, it’s built on constantly generating new ideas, and this only happens with the right mix of the right people. How can we make all of this happen? One of the ways is with big collaborative research projects which are part-funded by industry and partly by public investment. In this post, I look at how this works.
It may sound like a cliché these days to hear people describe some new piece of technology as ‘next generation’. But here at IMSE, we’re working on the convergent science that underpins those kinds of technologies. And on our Master’s course, we’re training the people who will invent and develop these next generation technologies, and the manufacturing processes for them too. On 23rd June this year, we got to hear from our current cohort of 12 MRes students about progress on their research projects. It’s a great day for IMSE every year to see our students putting the IMSE approach into practice!