This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of legitimacy for the ELSA network and the main reason for this lies in the fact that the ELSA community is in itself broadly interdisciplinary and disagrees on the actual and desired nature of ELSA research.
Instead of a linear progression of high school to college to work to professional engineer qualification to retiring someday, these pathways show that engineers can be much more broadly interdisciplinary and engage with multiple fields, both within engineering and with disciplines such as art or business.
In this essay, we share some perspectives and examples that have emerged for us over the past 10 years or so as we have attempted to offer a broadly interdisciplinary environment in which our students and faculty explore and understand biology.
Human ecology has been broadly defined as the interdisciplinary study of the complex and varied systems of interaction between humans and their environment (Editors, Human Ecology 1972).
Machine learning is a well-established and interdisciplinary research field, broadly fitting within the umbrella of Cybernetics, that seeks to endow machines with this sort of ability, rendering them able to 'learn' from past experiences, perform pattern recognition and identification in scrambled data, and ultimately self-regulate [1, 2].
We then explore the implications of this variation for student learning and interdisciplinary education more broadly.
These broadly sketched global trends formed the backdrop for an interdisciplinary research program that set out to study the effects of globalization on the health of Canadians (2006 2012).
Broadly defined, the work aims to encourage the development of genuine interdisciplinary understanding, or "the capacity to integrate knowledge and modes of thinking in two or more disciplines or established areas of expertise to produce a cognitive advancement … in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single disciplinary means" (Boix Mansilla and Duraisingh, 2007, p. 219).
The pharmacometrics discipline applies a collection of interdisciplinary quantitative tools and methodologies in three main functional areas broadly defined as pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics (PD) and disease modelling (DM).
The subsequent conferences have resulted in a move to more interdisciplinary approaches with researchers aiming to combine the contextuality of archaeological research, which broadly describes the state of archaeoastronomy today, rather than merely establishing the existence of ancient astronomies archaeoastronomers seek to explain why people would have an interest in the night sky.
We have established a new Office of Translational Biomedicine at the NIEHS to facilitate interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research endeavors, and we will seek to collaborate more broadly across the medical research community to maximize the potential gains from this approach.
