Duke Recognized Among Top Universities in the World for Interdisciplinary Science

Duke also ranked joint first in the “process” category, thanks to the university’s numerous mechanisms to support interdisciplinary inquiry, including seed grants, collaborative research centers and hubs, complex project management, tenure and promotion standards that value interdisciplinary research, and administrative expertise in reducing barriers to cross-cutting scholarship.

“Interdisciplinary science isn’t only a way to pursue discovery: It’s a way to restructure our institutions of learning to encourage new questions and perspectives on how the world and all its systems are interconnected,” said Wendy Schmidt, cofounder of Schmidt Sciences and Schmidt Science Fellows, which runs the rankings project in association with Times Higher Education. “The universities in this year’s Interdisciplinary Science Rankings have created environments that nurture this new way of seeing and the groundbreaking discoveries it can bring.”

An Environment for Collaboration

Duke has created structures that bring together researchers across traditional boundaries, creating an environment where collaboration thrives.

The Office of Interdisciplinary Programs coordinates the work of major cross-school interdisciplinary activities, creates communities of practice, spearheads strategic initiatives, and ensures that cross-school endeavors complement and amplify the work going on within the schools.

Eleven university-wide institutes facilitate matchmaking among faculty with overlapping interests, and Duke offers a robust set of internal funding opportunities to encourage cross-school collaborations.

Through Duke’s Bass Connections program, seed funding provides grants of about $25,000 per team, enabling faculty-student groups to launch projects or begin new avenues of inquiry. With an annual investment of roughly $2 million, the program has generated more than $120 million in external funding over 12 years.

Larger seed grants of $400,000 annually for three-year interdisciplinary “hubs” provide research teams with the runway to pursue major external funding.

Thoughtful infrastructure and administrative practices support collaboration.

Infrastructure and Practices

Duke’s schools of medicine, nursing, engineering, environment and divinity, along with departments in the natural sciences and the library, are all in close walking distance of each other. Many departments in the social sciences and humanities are also nearby.

Buildings such as Gross Hall, which houses several interdisciplinary units including the Social Science Research Institute and Science & Society, and Chesterfield, which houses startups through the Duke Quantum Center, create collision spaces for daily interaction.

The university has used cluster hiring to build capacity around the exploration of major challenges and has pursued educational innovation to build interdisciplinary collaboration into the curriculum. All undergraduate engineering students take a first-year design course with team projects and clients. All other first-year students take either an interdisciplinary cluster of seminars in the Focus program or one of 16 constellations that examine big questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives. A set of new Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Collaboratives will prepare graduate students to tackle areas such as society-centered AI, climate and health, and data science for public service.

Duke’s experience shows that interdisciplinarity flourishes when connectivity is treated as essential scholarly infrastructure.