Thanks, Ben. Thank you,
Lisa, for that introduction.
Well, it's very exciting to be
able to visit with you this afternoon,
share with you some strategies that
collectively Virginia Tech has used to
try to create the environment
where interdisciplinary
trans-disciplinary work evolves.
I would say from the smallest
to the largest problem,
there's not a meeting I go to or
anything that I read that I would say,
"Oh, this is just disciplinary-specific."
Now, there are certainly disciplinary
things we need to know,
but as we begin to address
the issues of today, we need to have
a broader perspective, and that's what
the investment institutes are trying to do.
Very quickly, I'm just going to talk
a tiny bit about ISCE
in terms of how we set the stage for that,
and then give you some examples where
we've seen success with our faculty.
When ISCE was created actually,
I would say that all we could just change
ISCE to ICAD or any of the investment institutes.
It was really about to increase
competitiveness in terms of our ability to
secure external funding as
a mechanism to do the research and
scholarship that our faculty wanted to do
and have certainly the capabilities to do.
We support this idea
of interdisciplinary team science.
The idea that the work that we do also has
translational benefits, either directly or indirectly.
For ISCE in particular,
we focus on the societal concerns
that impact the lives of people and places.
We leveraged the university's funds
that have invested in all of us
to try to promote this idea of
team science and looking at
how do we cross the disciplines together.
In ISCE, we have four broad themes
that a lot of our research fits into,
and they're broad intentionally so that
we take a bottom-up and a top-down approach.
Bottom-up then is that we
listen to the faculty and help to
cultivate the work that you are
most interested in doing,
and a little bit top-down in that part of our jobs
as institute directors is to be aware of
those outside forces and what's coming
down the pike, because we all know when
we see those RFAs that we're five years behind
those decisions have been made long
before the announcements come out.
How do we do it? Well, in ISCEs world,
we do it in a variety of ways.
We support centers.
Some we create, some are
our added value to in terms
of finances and other types of support,
and it's the centers and one
that need to be interdisciplinary.
They need to have their fingers out into the world.
We also have a variety of support programs.
The one that's probably our homework or
signature program or our Scholars' Program,
but we also have smaller programs
for more specific types of areas.
Of course, anybody anytime
can come talk to us about their ideas
and we may be able to provide some
type of support to get you started on that.
We also are the home to
the policies strategic growth area
as policy has always been an
important part of the work
that faculty that affiliate with ISCE do.
But the institutes aren't just about the money.
We do a lot more than that,
we do have some funds, and we're able
to provide that, and that's an important piece.
But what I'm showing on
the slide here is just all the ways
in that ways that we try to support
the faculty so you can do the science.
If you haven't, I'll do a little infomercial.
If you haven't signed up for
the ISCE newsflash, you'll want to do that.
If you go to our website,
that's a weekly news and
information newsletter that we send out that
gives some funding opportunities,
some events that are happening on campus,
to highlight some of the work in
the social and behavioral sciences.
But we provide other types of mechanisms to
help to foster these interdisciplinary teams,
whether that will be technical assistance from
reading proposals, having brainstorming ideas,
to working together across institutes, across colleges,
and departments to support the work
that's being done and variety of other piece.
I will just highlight one other item, which is
relatively new is our VT-Fast team,
which is our faculty activity support team.
Genistein or the Franklin Institute
spearheaded this.
His idea was, let's bring together
the support staff that we
have at the various institutes and
colleges who are good at the mechanics of grants,
whether that'll be putting them together, proofreading,
writing, technical assistance, budgeting,
you name it; you need it.
Fast Team is where you want to start and then
that network goes out to work with you.
Those are just some of the ways, and we can talk more
about those individually or at another time,
because what I want to spend my last couple
minutes on is to show you some of
the opportunities and successes that
faculty have had through the institute.
Our very first success that I think was like,
Wow, this is pretty different,
was a faculty member in
marriage and family therapy who connected with
a faculty member in
industrial systems engineer who was a modeler.
This was a call that came out
of NIH, and it wasn't specifically to this topic,
but it was this idea of using
broad modeling to understand social phenomena.
In this case, as a therapist,
she was interested in depression
because there's all kinds of treatments
for depression,
and what's the right one?
What are the key ingredients?
This project allowed them to do that.
They had a scholar's grant from us,
which we gave them a lot of
technical assistance as they begin to learn
their languages of each other and
the result was the successful grant.
Similarly, we have a team of scholars
that come out of psychology and VTCRI,
the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
That, you might say, "Well,
that doesn't look very interdisciplinary, but it is."
If we look at individuals such as
the head investigator Jungmeen Kim-Spoon,
who is a developmental psychologist
who's working with people that are
neuro-psychologists, health behavioralist,
addiction specialists, statisticians
to address this idea of neuro-determinants
of adolescents' behavior.
First study they did was on
substance abuse, and now they were
just refunded to move that project forward.
But here too, this started with
a Scholars Program where they met,
they got to know each other and
what the key issues were, again,
learning the language and
how to tackle this problem
of adolescents' concern from multiple angles.
Then they came back to us
and said we "We were successful,
but we could use a little bit more seed funding
to get us ready for this next grant.
They're the projects we like,
and especially because
they had been so successful."
We also have seen success in NSF.
In this example, persons started out
with the scholars, then a group of them had a
support program, and we called
our Global Issues Initiative
Research Support Program that ended up
most recently with a
research traineeship that is focused
on disaster resilience and risk management.
Chris Zobel and Zheng Yang from UAP, BIT.
We have business, we have architecture,
we have geoscience,
we have engineers working together.
These are only some of the leading players.
There's more than 30 faculty from,
I believe all the colleges
invested and involved in this particular project.
But it didn't happen overnight.
It started back probably in
around 2008 with Chris and Yang,
and some others really
starting to talk about the disasters
and that work and that grew
and grew and people came in and came out,
brought different levels of expertise.
Now, we have this cluster on campus dealing
with risk management and resilience
around disaster work.
It's a very exciting program.
USDA also dips its toe in interdisciplinary work.
This work joins faculty from nutrition,
from the Virginia Cooperative Extension,
from Public Health Sciences, and the
Center for Public Health Practice and Research,
which is an ISCE center.
Really looking at living with diabetes,
and it's very much focuses on
issues that tech cares a lot about.
Being health, being community,
particularly rural community.
Here, in this project,
it isn't just about
the scholars and researchers on campus,
but it's about the community partners as well.
NEH, another example.
Several years ago, they came out with
a call called digging into the data.
Here you have unionists who
connect up with data scientists,
computer scientists, and so forth,
to make sense out of topic X, Y,
or Z. Tom Ewing from History and
Bernice Husman from English connected up
with the computer science folks
to first study was to
look at the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Very interesting stuff and you say English,
History, how's that a big problem?
Well, think about it.
We still have a pandemic,
we still have spreads of disease.
I was listening today about the latest on
the lettuce, right? That's localized to the United States,
but it's still an issue of trying to
connect it, and what's the story behind that?
That's what this work that they've start with
and it has then multiplied into
other successful grants.
Once you begin building these things
and you begin noting these reputations,
it is very important.
Again, it doesn't happen over a night,
and what we often find is
that it's really important for
faculty to show some a track record
that of working together.
It doesn't have to about everybody
working with everybody,
but the funders are much more comfortable
when they see the connection that
you were just exhibiting
through the movements that you were doing.
Then finally, I would say is our newest project.
This is lead by Tina Savla,
a gerontologist and her colleagues aren't here,
they are at ACMA but she
has put together a team that includes a geriatrician,
a psychologist, a psychiatrist,
and endocrinologist, and a nurse educator as
they're looking at the use of acceptance,
and awareness, and the passion,
in other words, mindfulness
in caregiving for older adults.
You see these individuals that you say, "Oh yes,
they're from the medical field,
but they don't always talk to each other."
This team has building for
several years and has now just been
successful as they're kicking off this project
here and they have partners, and they lost as well.
I will leave you to say that,
what the investment institutes can help
with, in conjunction with
your department in your colleges,
and each other is to provide the space,
to provide the permission,
and provide the opportunity to work together,
to work towards these interdisciplinary pieces.
On that note, I will tell you that I love this quote,
"The important thing is not to win,
it is to take part."
It's part of a study that they did
of competitive research program
in Switzerland, where they compare
people who were awarded Team Grants
and those who were not awarded but applied.
What they found was, regardless of whether
they received the award or not,
there was a 17 percent increase in
their scholarship in both the quality and the quantity.
Why do you propose [inaudible] it affects and
enhance your scholarship and
broaden the opportunity for collaborations.
On that note, I'll turn it over to Ben.