By James Tooze, Policy Officer, Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), @ScienceCampaign
Arguably the greatest challenges that the world faces require interdisciplinary approaches, finding experts from across research disciplines and working together to tackle these issues head on. The recognition of the importance of interdisciplinary research has led the UK Government to increase its challenge-based funding, aiming to bring together researchers from different disciplines to solve these challenges. Despite this, barriers to increasing interdisciplinary research are still present, as set out in our recent roundtable discussion between senior academics and civil servants, hosted by The Physiological Society and the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE).
Physiology has been able to contribute so much to our knowledge of life and is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The Physiological Society’s report Growing Older, Better highlighted some of the barriers to grant funding applications and greater emphasis being placed on individual disciplines over interdisciplinarity in academic settings. These issues were also identified as being key barriers to interdisciplinary research across STEM during our roundtable, in addition to lack of clarity over career progress in interdisciplinary research fields and a fewer number of high-quality journals that will publish interdisciplinary research findings. During our discussions, participants told us that using the (REF) to highlight the impact and high quality of interdisciplinary research could be an important driver in increasing the opportunities and profile of interdisciplinary research within universities.
The UK Government, has a significant role to play in incentivising and rewarding interdisciplinary research endeavours, through various policy levers it possesses to support research and innovation. Through the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in particular, the importance that the UK Government places on interdisciplinary research was clear in the landmark Industrial Strategy published in 2017 and more recently in the UK R&D roadmap. The Industrial Strategy has so far committed £2.6bn of public funds towards grand societal challenges, which have sought to bring together experts from across the UK to tackle these issues, such as healthy ageing, in an interdisciplinary way.
As the funding envelope for research and innovation continues to rapidly grow in the UK in line with the UK Government’s commitment to R&D budgets rising to 2.4% of GDP, UKRI can seek to increase the amounts of grant funding available for interdisciplinary research. Often the larger grant sizes more commonly administered in challenge-based funds aimed at driving interdisciplinary research, are too large and exclude many researchers from accessing them. Making a greater number of smaller and more accessible grant opportunities available could be extremely valuable in fostering collaborations between groups to work in a cross-disciplinary way.
Of course, interdisciplinary research is much broader than ‘traditional’ STEM disciplines. At CaSE’s 2020 Annual Lecture, the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser ,and honorary member of The Physiological Society, Sir Patrick Vallance remarked that in conjunction with physical sciences and physiological research, behavioural research plays a key part in understanding how people can adapt to change and alter personal habits to bring about the changes required for combatting global health issues or climate change. The Government Office for Science (GO Science), led by Sir Patrick, are working to embed science and technology across the whole of the UK Government to use cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research to inform policy decisions that touch every aspect of our lives. This work by GO Science will also be very important in providing a platform of support for interdisciplinary research.
The UK Government has clearly identified the importance of interdisciplinary working in not only solving societal challenges but also in driving knowledge forwards. It is therefore important that the Government can support interdisciplinary research, as set out during our roundtable discussions, to maximise the opportunities and outputs from UK research.
Download a report of the roundtable discussion hosted by The Physiological Society and CaSE.
Please note that all views expressed on The Physiological Society’s blog reflect those of the author(s) and not of The Society.