Published March 25, 2008, last updated on March 4, 2013
By Kathryn Milam
[originally published on DukeToday, March 25 2008]
A new program allows Duke schools to collaborate with university institutes and centers (UICs) to hire new tenure and tenure-track faculty positions to work in interdisciplinary areas of scholarship and education.
The UICs and schools jointly will hire five tenure and tenure-track faculty to augment current teaching capabilities and to conduct research in areas such as environmental genomics, environmental health, medical sociology, global health policy and neural circuits and behavior. As with regular hires, departments and schools will remain the hiring and promotion units.
“These new faculty will add significantly to the cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and scholarship that Duke is already well-known for,” said Susan Roth, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies.
The initial hires will be made in five areas:
• The Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy to use the emerging field of environmental genomics to examine the effects of fossil fuel emissions on global warming.
• The Duke Global Health Institute and the Nicholas School to explore connections between environmental health and biological, genetic, behavioral and structural factors as they affect global mortality rates.
• The Department of Sociology and the Global Health Institute to collaborate on the study of the sociology of religion, race/ethnicity, social inequality and medical sociology.
• The Sanford Institute for Public Policy and the Global Health Institute to study global health policy.
• The departments of biology and neurobiology and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences to investigate brain functions such as perception, learning and memory, motor control and emotion at the cellular and molecular levels.
“With this faculty funding, UICs and schools have the jump-start they need to work together to contribute ‘knowledge in the service of society,’” said Provost Peter Lange. “This is an important initiative that recognizes that faculty whose scholarship is closely tied to the missions of the UICs can contribute to the generally interdisciplinary areas of vitality within schools and across them.”
Duke officials said this approach also encourages development of collaborative undergraduate and graduate programs where students can understand interdisciplinary connections and the ways knowledge can benefit communities.
“For the student, there is something new and important to be learned in the observation of multiple disciplinary perspectives collaboratively tackling the real complexity that any societal problem holds,” Roth said. “There is truly the potential for innovation in education if one engages students and faculty in problem-centered, collaborative and often entrepreneurial knowledge generation and dissemination in the service of society.”
Further joint faculty proposals will begin in the fall of 2008.
