Through my involvement with the Maastricht Young Academy, I had the pleasure (and the pain) of taking part in designing and implementing the MYA Interdisciplinary Grant initiative, which encourages and supports young UM researchers to collaborate across disciplines to address a societal issue. We recently awarded our inaugural prize to Amir Ebrahimi Fard (FSE) and Giulia Piccillo (SBE) with their proposal to assess the impact of repeated exposure to rumors on one’s belief system. As we noted in our call, 15,000 euros may not help them change the world, but we hope that it will give them the recognition and the support for their idea to continue growing.
The new UM Strategic Program highlights that we are an institution that has a “strong focus on innovative and interdisciplinary education and research” because we believe that in order to address pressing societal issues, researchers need to “build bridges across disciplines” and adopt a more “integrated and interdisciplinary approach” to our research.
While reviewing all the wonderful applications that we received, I observed two things: The first observation is that there are many wonderful researchers here at Maastricht already collaborating on fascinating subjects from those who are mapping human dignity discourses at the European Court of Human Rights to those who are working on creating self-healing polyaspartic coatings for industrial and biomedical applications. Our shared wealth of knowledge and the diversity of our young researchers’ interests not only give credence to the claims made in our Strategic Program, but they no doubt contribute to the UM consistently placing in the Top 10 of the Times Higher Education Ranking for Young Universities.
However - and this leads me to my second observation (and the cause of my pain) - there are still many obstacles that make interdisciplinary collaboration difficult, especially for younger researchers. First, there is a lot of uncertainty involved (e.g. you don’t have the network yet to know who is out there willing to collaborate on a shared topic of interest). Interfaculty collaborations can also entail higher risk (e.g. when your department head wants you to focus on your field-specific research), not to mention that they can be more cumbersome (e.g. a collaboration between the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience may require a single project to be approved by the ethics committee of both institutions, where there is no guarantee that these faculty specific assessors really know the intricacies of the “other discipline”, thus forcing an otherwise interdisciplinary project to conform into a more monodisciplinary one).
This is to note that in order to foster interdisciplinary and to promote projects that are truly collaborative, the composition of the assessment committees are vital. Using a personal anecdote, as a lawyer, it was rather difficult for me to understand what a polyaspartic coating was or to comprehend some of the mapping methodology advocated by the data scientists within our pool of applicants. However, what made the review of many of these applications possible, was not only for the composition of the assessment committees to be truly interdisciplinary, but for each of the assessors to be curious and patient enough to see even the assessment phase as a genuine learning opportunity for ourselves.
Luckily, I believe that the UM has a variety of funding institutions that not only advertise interdisciplinarity, but that also employ assessment committees that are truly enthusiastic about collaboration and passionate about learning, including but not limited to SWOL, Studio Europa Maastricht, Diversity & Inclusivity Grants, Learning & Innovation Grant, and many more. So while there is much more work to be done to further manifest the visions laid out in our new strategic program, there are many reasons for optimism and we hope that MYA’s inaugural Interdisciplinary Grant is just the most recent addition.