Good afternoon everyone. Um my name is Lisa Lee,
I'm the Associate Vice President here um at at
Tech for Scholarly Integrity and Research Compliance and I'm delighted
to be here this afternoon. Um our panel this
afternoon is really to be looking at um transdisciplinary
directions for research funding. So all great ideas,
lots of good things to have uh you know,
percolating up today. Um and we need to think
a little bit about how do we actually get money
to do these this important work, whether it's normative
work or actual research. So we have a great
panel with us this afternoon and um I'm gonna just
start by by introducing them briefly. Karen Roberto is
here first on the panel here university Distinguished Professor and
she's the director of one of our investment institutes,
which I'll talk about in a second. Our Institute
for Society, Culture and Environment. Next to her
is Ben Knapp and he is the director for another
of our investment institutes, the Institute for Creativity, Arts
and Technology here at Tech. And then finally,
um Sunil Iyengar, Iyengar um from the National
Endowment for the Arts, he's the Director of the
Office of Research and Analysis. So a panel that
we hope what we can do is generate some ideas
around transdisciplinary research funding. Um we we will
have some time for discussion, but before we do
that, our present, our panel will do a
short presentation. But before we get to them,
I wanted just to touch base a little bit about
here at Tech and what we have been doing over
the years to really promote this idea of transdisciplinary
research. Um, we have invested in a great
deal of idea making in in um nurturing scholars to
do this kind of work. Um, and we
have invested in four institutes here. Um, they
were developed to fuel research by investing in what what
we think of as high risk but high reward activities.
So we the four institutes in case you don't
know are Fralin Life Sciences. The two here,
Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology, Institute, excuse
me, Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science,
as well as the Institute for Society, Culture and
Environment. So the idea with these investment institutes is
to create an atmosphere that is highly collaborative, not
unlike what we're seeing here today to really promote interdisciplinary
research across the university community. So they were designed
really to help us think about solutions to the stubborn
problems that we have in the world, many of
which we're discussing today. Um again by bringing together
diverse perspectives that don't actually fit into the typical siloed
funding sources. So really helping us all think about
what each of us can bring to the table to
to address some of these questions. These stubborn global
problems which some people have called wicked problems and various
other terms are the kinds of perplexing issues we're talking
about today. So we've talked about inequitable infrastructure,
climate change, economic and political refugees, racism,
homophobia gun violence. The list goes on, um
what all these things have in common these kinds of
problems is that they're perplexing. Not only because their
causes are complex, right? It's it's we can't
just find a bug, a virus or a bacteria
that causes something, then nip it out. We
really it's a complex mix of um, you know,
social, sometimes biological, sometimes um cultural,
just a whole bunch of different influences that make these
problems occur. And to boot all these causes are
not very well understood. Part of the reason they're
not well understood is because we each look at them
through our own lenses, whatever our discipline is,
We look at it and we see that, but
we often fail to to do what we're doing today,
which is to bring various lenses to look at
this problem, to decipher what the causes are,
um to understand what both the causes and the consequences
of these kinds of issues are. What is really
clear is that our human flourishing depends on our solving
these problems. I think that's something we could all
agree with. Um we're gonna focus today um,
on this discussion on resource development for the funding to
look at these complex problems, not just to to
examine and outline and describe their causes, but really
to think about the solutions to them because those solutions
are not obvious. If they were we'd have solved
it already. I mean, think of all the
smart people in this room. Um, and uh
we we could probably solve pretty much any problem but
these kind of wicked problems or or or um these
these kinds of complex problems really take, take a
little bit from all of us. So one of
the things we want to do is bring to light
this issue that doing trans disciplinary research is really hard
and it's hard for a lot of reasons. Um
funding or lack thereof is one of the reasons.
It's hard. And so we're gonna talk a little
bit today. Um I hope through our discussion um
to address how to at least get make inroads into
that that little part of it or big part of
it. Um So I'm gonna pose several questions for
our panelists and then well we want to open it
up for discussion so we will have some mix and
I really want us to be talking about these issues
related to to funding this kind of research. But
before I do that each of our panelists is gonna
come up and give us a short overview of some
remarks that they've prepared and then we'll get started.
So thank you again for being here and for your
attention and I'm gonna turn it over first to Karen 109 00:05:53.639 --> A:middle L:90% Roberto