Provost Steven Hyman talks about the new recommendations for fostering more interdisciplinary research at Harvard and why it’s taken the university so long to move in this direction.

Corie Lok

Interdisciplinary research is not a new trend in science circles, but Harvard, often criticized for being complacent, is only now beginning to take action institution-wide to engage more in this kind of research and, perhaps most importantly, to recognize that its culture of decentralized management prevents this research from happening easily.

In a 97-page report released on Friday, a panel of 24 faculty members from across Harvard made nine recommendations, some far reaching, on how to change Harvard’s research enterprise to allow faculty and students from different departments, campuses, and hospitals to more easily work together in interdisciplinary research. The report is frank in pointing out Harvard’s weaknesses: with so many loosely connected departments, schools, and affiliated hospitals spread out across the greater Boston area, each with its own management structures, faculty and students can’t easily collaborate and often needlessly duplicate each other’s work.

The recommendations include:

– the creation of a university-wide committee of deans and faculty members with the power to evaluate, fund, and assign space to interdisciplinary research projects on all of Harvard’s campuses;

– the hiring of at least 75 new faculty over the next 10 years for interdisciplinary projects;

– the creation of four new departments—regenerative biology and medicine, systems biology, chemical and physical biology, and neuroscience—that span Harvard’s various schools;

– the establishment of five new committees to recruit faculty in the areas of bioengineering, microbial sciences, energy and the environment, human genetics, and quantitative analysis.

“What’s new here is the recognition that the community here is not only ready for interdisciplinary research, but we’re chomping at the bit for it,” says George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who was not on the faculty committee. “That’s exciting.”

The impetus for this panel came largely from the deans of Harvard’s science-based schools and faculty last year, who have begun planning the science initiatives for the Allston campus, says Harvard’s provost, Steven Hyman. They and other Harvard leaders realized that science across the whole university needed to be re-evaluated before deciding how Allston should be governed, he adds.

This interim report is now open for comment from the Harvard community. The faculty panel aims to produce and deliver its final report to the Harvard president and governing boards by the end of this year.

Hyman was not a member of the panel but attended its meetings and provided support along the way. He talked with NNB about his reactions to the report and what he hopes to see come out of it.

Interdisciplinary research has been a trend for a while, and many scientists talk about the need to do this kind of research. How come it’s taken Harvard this long to realize that it needs to change the way it does science?

SH: The answer is because it’s a very successful, decentralized organization. The more successful you are at doing what you’re doing, the more difficult it is to say, “Perhaps we have to think in a different way.”

Harvard has been criticized for being slow to adapt to changing times. Given that, how is this report to be interpreted?

SH: What you see in this report is a group of mid-career faculty leaders who are basically frustrated with the often high barriers to taking on new problems, to collaborating—even within schools and across departments, let alone across schools or with the hospitals. Faculty members want greater mobility for themselves and their students, lower barriers to collaboration, and ways of fostering new kinds of science, while maintaining our investments in disciplines.

These issues have been bubbling beneath the surface. I’ve had theories of how we might answer these questions. But in the end, this has to be a matter not for administrators to solve top down but for the faculty to solve bottom up.

What do you hope will come from this report?

SH: I’m quite delighted with the report. The trick is to have a healthy portfolio and not throw the baby out with the bathwater—preserving our current strengths while expanding into new interdisciplinary areas.

I can’t predict what suggestions will come in and what the final form of the report will be, but my hope is that whatever the mechanism, we don’t dilute the goals of greater collaboration, mobility, and agility for faculty and students.

Now that Larry Summers is no longer president, and we don’t know who will be the new president, how do we know this report won’t languish?

SH: Larry was the committed spokesperson for these values, but this vision is the vision of the faculty, not of one person. It has momentum because the faculty wants to be liberated to collaborate.

My belief is that the right thing for Harvard to do is to help the faculty achieve the key goals enunciated in this report, however we ultimately implement them. The need is going to be pressing, whoever the next president will be.