Research on complex problems requires integration across boundaries. INTEREACH is a community for the people who make that happen.
Interdisciplinarity is not new, but the need to bring intentionality, excellence, and talent to the job of connecting moving parts of integrated projects is increasingly critical to address broad, interconnected problems and meet ambitious interdisciplinary goals. Whether addressing medicine, energy, water supply, sustainable agriculture, climate change preparedness, environmental protection - all require iterative communication and orchestrated parallel progress to advance.
Our purpose is to articulate and promote the need for a dedicated career path around interdisciplinary research expertise, and to improve practitioners' tools, best practices, success metrics, and career trajectories. Though interdisciplinary connection, translation and synthesis is a huge part of the success of complex scientific endeavors, these functions (particularly post-award) are often either handled in an ad-hoc way, or by people who are in academic careers with a much less established, valued and visible trajectory than the traditional tenure track pathway. This leads to science outcomes that are sub-optimal, and in many cases fails to appropriately recognize and incentivize the intellectual leadership and expertise needed to foster connections, facilitate collaboration and synthesize ideas that are greater than the sum of their parts.
The Intereach Community focuses its efforts on:
1. Developing the Profession: Making the case for the value of INTEREACH professionals to establish training and career pathways.
2. Professional Development: Training and educating INTEREACH professionals, the disciplinary and interdisciplinary researchers they serve, and students in the pipeline for either of those paths.
The INTEREACH Community is affiliated as a Special Interest Group of the International Network for the Science of Team Science, a professional organization from which our community coalesced. Visit here to learn more about INSciTS membership!
