| Culture Change: NIH Launches Interdisciplinary Research Consortia |
By Angela Sharpe, Deputy Director for Health Policy, Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA)
Note: MPSA is a governing member of COSSA, which monitors all federal agencies that provide support for social and behavioral research and advocates for a non-politicized research agenda. This article appeared in the September 2007 issue of COSSA Washington UPDATE. For more information about COSSA, visit their website at http://www.cossa.org/.
Continuing its efforts to lower the “artificial organizational barriers” and advance science, on September 6 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through its Roadmap for Medical Research announced that it will fund nine interdisciplinary research consortia. According to the agency, the funding of these consortia represents a fundamental change in both the culture within which biomedical and behavioral research is conducted and the culture within the NIH where research projects are normally managed by the 27 individual institutes and centers (ICs).
Interdisciplinary research integrates elements of a wide range of disciplines, often including basic research, clinical research, behavioral biology, and social sciences so that all of the scientists approach the problem in a new way, as opposed to multidisciplinary research which involves teams of scientists approaching a problem from their discipline.
The intent is for these consortia to not only develop new ways to think about challenging biomedical problems, but to provide a stimulus for academic research culture changes such that interdisciplinary research becomes the norm. They address several current barriers to interdisciplinary research: (1) departmental boundaries within institutions; (2) recognition of team leadership within the projects; (3) cross training students in multiple disciplines; and (4) the NIH approach to interdisciplinary research administration.
“These programs are designed to encourage and enable change in academic research culture to make interdisciplinary research easier to conduct for scientists who wish to collaborate in unconventional ways,” said NIH Director Elias Zerhouni.
Echoing Zerhouni, Alan Krensky, newly appointed Director of the Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives (OPASI), noted that these consortia represent a new paradigm for NIH administration that will manage interdisciplinary programs through multiple NIH ICs in a truly trans-NIH manner.” OPASI provides the funding for NIH Director’s Roadmap initiatives. Management of the interdisciplinary research consortia will allow the agency to act as a single entity rather than a collection of 27 individual ICs. OPASI and the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) will oversee the entire program.
The consortia will be funded at a level of $210 million over five years. The missions of the consortia range broadly from probing the relationship between self-control and addictive behavior, to understanding the fundamentals of the aging process, and to developing new approaches to drug discovery and targeted gene therapy. It will integrate numerous disciplines including basic biological sciences, genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, biostatistics, biophysics, chemistry, gene therapy, stem cell biology, mechanical and tissue engineering, reproductive endocrinology, neurology, behavioral research, and the social sciences.