New neuroengineering IGERT program trains students how to do interdisciplinary research
The Beckman Institute building was designed in such a way as to enhance interdisciplinary research collaborations. But the human component of those collaborations, which involve researchers from different disciplines with often very different approaches to doing science, can sometimes resemble the famous poem about six blind men taking the measure of an elephant.
Nineteenth Century poet John Godfrey Saxe based his work on a fable from India about six blind men each trying to describe an elephant based only on the part of the elephant – the tusk, the trunk, etc. – they were touching. It was an instructive tale about the problem of trying to understand the whole based on disparate perspectives.
So how do researchers with dissimilar knowledge bases and perspectives work together effectively in an interdisciplinary research project? A new training grant involving a number of Beckman researchers is tackling that very question, while at the same time trying to advance the emerging field of neuroengineering.
A new five-year education and research grant from the National Science Foundation to fund one of their interdisciplinary training programs, known as an IGERT, was awarded to the University of Illinois in 2009 to train future researchers in how to collaborate in interdisciplinary neuroengineering projects.
More than 60 Illinois faculty members are associated with the training program, which is led by Beckman Institute faculty members Doug Jones as its principal investigator (PI) and Monica Fabiani and Todd Coleman as co-PIs, along with Bob Wickesberg. Jones and Coleman are faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering while Fabiani and Wickesberg are in the Department of Psychology.
Jones was involved in one of the most successful – and one of the most interdisciplinary – collaborations ever forged at Beckman: the Intelligent Hearing Aid project that encompassed the fields of engineering, computer science, speech and hearing science, and biology.
“Our success there sold me on the idea that, even strictly as an engineer, there is value for to me to collaborate with neuroscientists,” Jones said. “So I’ve continued to collaborate with biologists on different sets of problems.
“The first motivation was simply ‘here is this problem that human hearing does just fine, but we engineers couldn’t solve it. So maybe we could learn something from the brain.’ And we did. There is a lot of possibility for cross-fertilization in these types of connections.”
That experience has given Jones a unique perspective on trying to form collaborations between researchers who may have totally different approaches to doing science and who have little to no knowledge of their collaborator’s field.
“In some sense we’ve solved a lot of the problems that were easy to solve working in our own domains,” Jones said. “A lot of the problems that are left are kind of just extensions of the same old ones we are hitting walls on. As disciplines mature, you’re going to have to bring something new in to address those barriers.