University Park, Pa. -- Interdisciplinary research and education efforts at Penn State reach nearly every sector of academic life -- from senior faculty to undergraduates, across the vast majority of academic disciplines and at multiple campus locations.
"Universities need to be the place where walls are low, doors are flung open, and there is always room for one more in any activity," said Eva J. Pell, vice president for research and dean of the University's Graduate School, in a report to the University's Board of Trustees on May 12. "Our environment is one that nurtures interdisciplinarity and allows great ideas to grow in many directions."
The University's major interdisciplinary research efforts comprise six major units: the Dorothy Foehr Huck & Lloyd J. Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences; the Materials Research Institute; the Penn State Institutes of the Environments; the Social Science Research Institute/Children, Youth and Families Consortium; the Institute for the Arts & Humanities and the Applied Research Laboratory. Funded via the Office of the Vice President of Research, these six units impact nearly all academic colleges at University Park, as well as Penn State in Harrisburg and the College of Medicine in Hershey.
Just in the last year more than 150 junior and senior faculty, with salaries co-funded by the institutes and colleges, have garnered $33 million in research dollars from a broad spectrum of public and private agencies. A large contingency of faculty, beyond those whose salaries are co-funded, also benefit from the University's collaborative efforts, as do graduate students, including those in intercollege graduate degree programs, and nearly 450 undergraduate students who receive valuable educational experience via such research opportunities.
Forty-five percent of the co-funded faculty members have been at Penn State three years or less; their future impact is predicted to be great as they are collectively responsible for nearly 500 proposals now under review, representing almost $300 million in potential research funding.
Success in the University's interdisciplinary efforts can be measured not only in dollars but in reputation of faculty. There are 11 faculty members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 12 who are members of the National Academy of Sciences. Nearly all of these individuals are connected to the University's institutes in some manner.
Interdisciplinary undergraduate education is a longstanding practice at the University, as evidenced by the science, technology and society undergraduate program first offered almost 40 years ago and the environmental resource management major, nearly 30 years old. Several other Penn State colleges have followed this lead, including the College of Health and Human Development's majors in biobehavioral health and human development and family studies and the College of the Liberal Arts' women's studies and African and African American studies programs.
Innovation and growth of interdisciplinary opportunities are continuous, as exemplified by the College of Information Sciences and Technology, founded on the principle of interdisciplinary education, and its new bachelor of science degree in security and risk analysis, available starting in the fall 2006 semester. Likewise, the Eberly College of Science's recently developed forensic science major has become both a popular and nationally noteworthy field of study in its first year alone, attracting students and attention from national media for its inventive approach to teaching the scientific, legal and ethical aspects of crime-scene analysis.
Additionally, more than 80 minors incorporate cross-curricular studies -- such as the minor in civic and community engagement, which is now available at several campuses. During the last five years, more than one-third of those minors were created and students graduating with an interdisciplinary minor increased by more than 80 percent. As many as 3,500 students are pursuing these minors at any given time.
Several Penn State centers also support multidimensional education at the undergraduate level. These include the Rock Ethics Institute, housed in the College of the Liberal Arts; the Center for Advanced Undergraduate Study and Experience (CAUSE), in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences; the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, within the Smeal College of Business; the Center for Sustainability, originating from the College of Engineering; and the Office of Undergraduate Education's Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy. The latter two programs have developed collaborative partnerships for outreach efforts to Montana's Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, evidence of hands-on interdisciplinary experiences available to undergraduates at Penn State.
Robert Pangborn, vice president and dean for Undergraduate Education, stressed the wealth of opportunity for and significance of interdisciplinary education for undergraduate students. "Through courses, majors, minors and out-of-class experiences, our students learn to make connections that will help them to be successful problem solvers, innovators, leaders and citizens for the future," he said.