Integrating Knowledge: Five Critical Multidisciplinary Initiatives
One of SAS’s great attributes has long been its ability to maintain strength in traditional academic disciplines while remaining flexible enough to explore frontiers that lie outside these disciplinary boundaries. The School recognizes that many of the most complex ideas facing society are not easily addressed within the confines of a single discipline. To encourage the integration of knowledge, the School’s strategic plan calls for targeted investments in five multidisciplinary initiatives:
• Genes to Brains to Behavior
• Nanoscience
• Cross-Cultural Contacts
• Democracy and Constitutionalism
• Social Dimensions of Health
These areas strengthen core departments and programs while utilizing existing research strengths in SAS and other schools at Penn. They will result in advances in fundamental knowledge and transformative applications of that knowledge. In addition, each of these areas promises to have a significant impact on graduate and undergraduate education.
The School’s existing strengths in these areas are demonstrated by a range of research and teaching activities. In addition, new investments in these initiatives are proceeding along many fronts, including recruitment of key faculty and planning for major facilities improvements.
Genes to Brains to Behavior
Powerful computational techniques combined with a growing knowledge about fundamental life processes at the level of genes and molecules have brought us to the threshold of a new understanding of the human mind. Biology and psychology faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences are already poised at these new frontiers, and they have extensive research collaborations that reach out to other departments and programs in SAS as well as to other schools at Penn. In addition to recurring faculty who are at the forefront of this field, the School is also moving forward in its plans to construct a new Neural and Behavioral Sciences (NBS) Building. The new facility will serve as a natural hub where connections among the work of faculty from biology and psychology, and from all areas of the University that examine the brain and behavior, can be explored. The planned building will become the centerpiece for Penn’s initiatives in the life sciences.
Nanoscience
Nanoscience, the study of phenomena on the nanometer scale, is opening new horizons for technological advances in areas ranging from biomedicine to computing and the miniaturization of electronics. Advances in this field will enrich our lives and, in turn, enable new science. The School’s investment in the future of this area furthers collaboration with the health schools and the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), and will advance research and education. In order to fully realize the potential of nanoscience, SAS has joined forces with SEAS to construct a state-of-the-art nanoscale research and teaching facility. The new Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology will offer Penn’s outstanding engineers, biologists, physicists and chemists the high-performance laboratory space they need to build on their impressive track record of collaboration and make even more groundbreaking discoveries.
Cross-Cultural Contacts
The ever-increasing scale of social, political and economic interaction among peoples — whether internationally or here in the United States, home to the world’s most diverse mix of diaspora populations — has made contact between and among cultures an urgent area of investigation. SAS is already in the forefront in many areas of this activity. Across humanities and social sciences departments, faculty are studying and developing fresh perspectives on the complex issues facing today’s global society.
Democracy and Constitutionalism
Recent decades have witnessed free elections that have brought new democracies to countries throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa as well as former communist nations. Both at home and abroad, democracy and the political institutions that support it are constantly evolving, and that evolution is the subject of ongoing discussion and debate. In the humanities and the social sciences, SAS makes central intellectual contributions to the understanding of constitutional democracy through the work of departments, centers and programs, and through faculty research.
Social Dimensions of Health
The study of health care policy; the implementation of health care programs in specific cultural, social and political contexts; and the demographic consequences of changes in mortality, morbidity, medicine, public health and economic and social development and inequality are issues in which integrated knowledge from the social sciences is crucial. SAS faculty from several departments are engaged in research and other projects that advance both knowledge and practice. The School’s investments in this area also enhance undergraduate education, particularly the health and societies major, and create additional opportunities for undergraduate research.