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Graduate Student Organization Promotes Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Like faculty members, grad students are also attracted to interdisciplinary research

Biology graduate student Beth Archie knows a lot about elephants but less so about statistics. So when she needed to quantify social structures in elephants for her dissertation, she turned to statistics graduate student Eric Vance for advice.

Duke faculty members have long engaged in interdisciplinary collaboration, but Archie's project is one example of how interdisciplinary collaboration is for graduate students too. This increasing interest prompted a group of graduate students to form a student Center for Interdisciplinary Education Research and Development (CIERD) to promote and support interdisciplinary research by graduate students.

Started in 2004, CIERD helps students network among themselves, find collaborators and topics and presents forums and symposiums on interdisciplinary research. Organizers say the purpose is not just to help graduate students' research but also their education and career development.

"We try to create a network both physical and virtual that would help students to share knowledge and experience with each other," said Alexei Valiaev, a fifth-year engineering graduate student and one of CIERD organizers.

The success of Vance's work with Archie was one of the motivations for the group's formation. Archie was studying large family groups of female elephants. While male elephants leave the protection of their mothers and family members at around ages 14-17, female elephants stay with their mothers.

Why these large families of female elephants stay together even in times of drought and food scarcity during the African dry seasons isn't understood.

Through Duke's Institute for Statistics and Decision Sciences, Archie met Vance, who had traveled extensively through Africa. The collaboration benefited both students. Archie used Vance's statistical model for her dissertation, and Vance further explored the question of social network models of elephants as his preliminary exam topic. This led to his current dissertation research in dynamic networks.

Other graduate students also have had successful interdisciplinary experiences.

"Vast interaction with faculty and students across departments complemented by training in physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering and led to a network of advisers, collaborators and resources for my dissertation studies," said Faisal Reza, a third-year Ph.D. student in computational biology and bioinformatics and a member of CIERD. He's also a certificate student in biomolecular and tissue engineering program.

Reza has taken and assisted in teaching courses across disciplines and has helped to organized several interdisciplinary academic initiatives on campus.

Reza and CIERD organizers said starting an interdisciplinary project can be challenging for many students. It requires adding on academic courses outside their expertise and depends upon the cooperation and support of important faculty advisers. Interdisciplinary projects can also take longer to complete, the students said.

CIERD benefited from participation of more than 50 Duke faculty and staff in its workshops and symposiums. Last year, CIERD planned a Nano and Biotechnology Symposium sponsored by Duke and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. More than 20 speakers from a variety of disciplines lectured on the influence of nano- and biotechnology on society, business and public policy as well as on research from the basic sciences, engineering and medicine.

Robert McMahan, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor and science and technology senior adviser to N.C. Governor Mike Easley, presented a keynote speech on "Nanotechnology and Biotechnology Public Policy and the Environment." The symposium also was a showcase for graduate students to present their interdisciplinary scholarship.

CIERD is following up this year with several projects to provide further forums for graduate students. CIERD is working with the Graduate School to develop academic networking workshops to match the interests of faculty and students to help students find interdisciplinary dissertation topics and faculty advisers.

"One of the issues is that a successful interdisciplinary collaboration can take many months to come to fruition," Valiaev said. "So it can be difficult to measure our success in promoting such collaborations. So CIERD is now looking at how to devise evaluation strategies that look over a long period of time. This will be important in helping us measure the group's success."