DOI: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.27136.1 ISSN: 2398-502X

Creative synthesisers:  Students’ experience of interdisciplinary collaboration

Annamaria Carusi, Maca Gomez-Gutierrez
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Background Interdisciplinarity is often promoted in research funding, and interdisciplinary collaboration is often highlighted in research policy in the UK and abroad. Funders have different routes to promoting and funding interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we focus on Wellcome’s funding of doctoral training in the biosciences, which coupled encouraging disciplinary diversity as an aspect of positive research culture, with student-centred doctoral training. Methods The context of our research was a community of practice, comprising all staff and students of the doctoral training programmes. Within the communities, we used a participative observation approach, inviting participants to reflect on their experiences in group discussions with students and staff within each of the programmes and individual interviews with key staff members. Results Working closely with the funded doctoral programmes, our research found that 1) funding that follows doctoral students rather than supervisors, within a structured pool of selection, supports and develops existing interdisciplinary collaborations, and forges new ones. 2) over and above existing well discussed research skills, synthetic understanding, which integrates information from a wide range of sources (textual and interpersonal) emerges as an important area of interdisciplinary knowledge development. Conclusion The ability to create synthetic understandings is a research skill needs to be extricated from the umbrella term of ‘soft skills’ and actively supported, through training or through some other means of making explicit how to develop it.

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