Convergence research

Using field experiences to generate transdisciplinary research questions

By Kimberly Bourne and Alison Deviney.

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1. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
2. Alison Deviney (biography)

What are the benefits of field experiences for large convergence research centers? How can they be used to generate new research questions that cross disciplines and benefit local communities?

We draw on a two-day retreat centered around a geographically specific issue to provide lessons that may be useful for others. The retreat combined field excursions and a brainstorming workshop to generate new research questions. An additional benefit was that it positively changed the power dynamics in the group.

In our case, the large convergence research center focuses on innovations for sustainable phosphorus management. A central field site is in South Florida, USA, where phosphorus pollution from agricultural and urban areas threatens a wetlands national park (the Everglades).

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Setting up your team for knowledge integration

By Shalini Misra, Megan A. Rippy and Stanley B. Grant.

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1. Shalini Misra (biography)
2. Megan A. Rippy (biography)
3. Stanley B. Grant (biography)

What kinds of collaborative arrangements best foster knowledge integration? Should you keep your team together by forming one big group to work toward your shared goals? Or should you differentiate tasks by breaking work into smaller components and assign the pieces to sub-groups? How large should sub-groups be and how should they be composed? What types of engagement processes lead to successful knowledge integration?

If you have led a large cross-disciplinary research effort, you have grappled with these questions.

We addressed these questions by assessing the linkages between integration processes and research products in a self-evaluation of the first two years of our National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research project on inland freshwater salinization (Misra, Rippy and Grant, 2024).

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Team science is an integral competency for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator Program

By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke

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1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
3. Michael O’Rourke (biography)

What roles do research and development agencies have in actively preparing research teams to engage productively in collaborative research? Is it enough to require that teams engaging in funded research prepare themselves to collaborate effectively?

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Program was launched in 2019 to fast track the development of ideas into real-world applications and solutions intended to have substantive societal and economic impact. Building upon basic research and discovery and using a convergent approach, the program accelerates use-inspired research toward impact by funding multidisciplinary teams from a wide range of disciplines and sectors to solve complex societal and economic challenges.

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Why is it so hard to agree on definitions of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity?

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

As more and more researchers, educators, universities and research organisations, funders, and policy makers become interested in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, the demand for clear unequivocal definitions of these terms grows. Why is agreeing on such definitions so hard? And what’s the way forward?

The late Julie Thompson Klein’s work tracking typologies of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity over time (Klein, 2017) is revealing and provides the basis for this i2Insights contribution.

Klein pointed out that in the latter half of the twentieth century, the classification of the Western intellectual tradition “into specialized domains within a larger system of disciplinarity” was “supplemented and challenged” by an increasing number of activities that involved disciplinary interactions.

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Seven tips for developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals

By Gemma Jiang, Jin Wen and Simi Hoque

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jin Wen (biography)
3. Simi Hoque (biography)

What are the key ingredients for successfully developing large-scale cross-disciplinary research proposals? What’s required for a team to successfully work together at the proposal development stage?

Here we provide seven lessons based on our experience, divided into:

  • team characteristics
  • structuring the grant proposal writing process.

Team characteristics

Lesson 1: Invite a mix of new blood and established experience.
It is useful to have team members at various stages of their careers, as well as researchers who have worked together previously and those who have never met before. It can work well to have clusters of researchers who have worked intensively within the cluster, but who are new to each other across clusters.

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Three complexity principles for convergence research

By Gemma Jiang

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Gemma Jiang (biography)

How can principles adapted from complexity thinking be applied to convergence research? How can such principles help integrate knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines to form novel frameworks that catalyze scientific discovery and innovation?

I present three principles from the complexity paradigm that are highly relevant to convergence research. I then describe three types of transformative containers that I have developed to create enabling conditions for applying complexity principles to convergence.

1. Ecosystem consciousness: An inversion of perspectives

Ecosystem consciousness is necessary because in complex systems the whole (ecosystem) is bigger than the sum of its parts; the wellbeing of the whole and the parts are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.

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