Interdisciplinarity: The Right People, a Supportive Place, and a Program Emerges

Twenty-first-century biology is inherently interdisciplinary. Every aspect of biology, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems, is richly informed by the physical, mathematical, and computational sciences. Interdisciplinarity is a buzzword in biology education, and understandably so, for the major scientific challenges of the 21st century—climate change, global health, personalized medicine, and genetic engineering, to name a few—require insights from across the natural and mathematical sciences. It is both an exciting and daunting time for biology educators—exciting because of the vast opportunity for important new discoveries that will come about in an interdisciplinary context, yet daunting for many current biology educators who were not trained within such a framework. The call for transformation of the undergraduate biology experience to better address interdisciplinarity is not new. It has been 10 years since BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists (National Research Council, 2003) channeled the growing awareness of how technological advances blurred traditional disciplinary boundaries, challenging science educators to modify how and what we teach. Recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011) reissued the call in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. If our experience is any indication, even with broad interdisciplinary buy in, understanding how best to implement interdisciplinarity into the undergraduate science and mathematics experience is not always easy.