The project examines the requirements for becoming a researcher in 21st century bioscience research--what the PIs call a "transdisciplinary" researcher. Transdisciplinary is defined as a situation "where researchers have deep disciplinary knowledge and methods from one discipline but inhabit a research space in which there is interpenetration of one or more other disciplines."
The investigation specifically looks at the cognitive and learning practices for both undergraduates and graduate students, in the emerging transdisciplinary field of Integrative Systems Biology (ISB) where the research lies at the intersection of the computational, biological, and engineering sciences. The PIs will conduct historical and ethnographic research on learners in two laboratories--one inhabited by computational scientists and in another that conducts biological experiments, computational modeling, and engineering. Using observations and interviews, the ethnographies will investigate how learning unfolds in the labs, how newcomers are apprenticed, how they make choices regarding the cognitive tools and practices they appropriate, which ones they discard, and the research paths they take based on these experiences. The historical dimension examines historical records through the lens of cognitive science research. Data collection includes publications, grant proposals, dissertation proposals, presentations, laboratory notebooks, emails, technological artifacts and interviews on lab history.
The project explores how interdisiciplinary research in general moves forward, a topic that is critical to the conduct of 21st century science and to the education of 21st century scientists. The PIs define interdisciplinary research as research that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspective and concepts/theories from two or more disciplines. Thus, the PIs consider interdisciplinary to be a broad, overarching description, while transdisicplinary research concerns a kind of interdisciplinary work that leads to "interpenetation" of one more other disciplines. The field of ISB is such a transdisciplinary field and can make significant contributions to several pressing problems related to health and the environment.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Quantitative and computational methods are radically changing biological sciences, particularly in understanding processes at the systems level. The new field of integrative systems biology brings together biologists, engineers, applied mathematicians, and computational scientists, as insights and methods from all these fields are critical to address the complexity of the problems studied by 21st century biological sciences. Much of the research in systems biology is directed towards health and the environment. It has the potential, for example, to provide novel treatment for cancers through personalized medicine, as well as to help develop new and efficient biofuels. New computational powers, new data-collection technologies, and new algorithmic developments make it possible for the first time to productively investigate such multidimensional biological systems. A better understanding of the research practices in this emerging field can help in the design educational models and institutional policies that facilitate creativity and innovation in such transdisciplinary research. Our research shows that training researchers to practice systems biology is quite difficult, because the research requires deep knowledge in one or more disciplines, as well as the ability to transform that knowledge to fit one or more novel fields. For instance, an engineer might take concepts and methods from telecommunication systems, and transform them to understand cell signaling or gene networks. Further, researchers need to acquire knowledge and skills in fields for which they have no formal training. Interviewees in our study reported a number of constraints involved in their work, including: 1) difficulty in communicating and collaborating with researchers who have backgrounds in other disciplines 2) the cognitive challenge of understanding the complexity of large-scale biological and engineering systems 3) the lack of alignment between the time it takes to collect experimental data and the time it takes to build and test computational models, and 4) conflicting ideas held by different research disciplines on what constitutes good science Our investigation of research practices in systems biology shows further that in addition to developing technical expertise, researchers need also to develop specific critical skills for working across the disciplines: cognitive flexibility, interactive expertise, and resilience in the face of impasse. These are characteristics to be cultivated in young researchers and graduate students. Cognitive flexibility allows taking on new perspectives and developing new strategies. Interactive expertise involves quickly acquiring an understanding of the practices and research values of other disciplines for productive interactions. Accepting that impasses are inevitable in such research cultivates the ability to overcome them and forge new pathways. In translational design research, we have sought to apply our findings on requirements for productive learning in the complex research environments of systems biology to the development of new models for education. Existing models for interdisciplinary science and engineering education fail to address the reality of such research environments, which routinely bring together very diverse practitioners, such as molecular biologists and electrical engineers. Our research provides a new model of transdisciplinary education that leverages the expertise and skills of students from disparate fields, and we have developed a learning platform that makes it possible for all students to develop cognitive flexibility, interactive expertise and resilience. The model of research and learning developed in this project offers guidelines for educators and institutions while thinking about ways to better promote 21st century transdisciplinary research more broadly and while designing educational environments for students to excel in such research.
