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Rackham Interdisciplinary Problem Solving Initiative

The complexity of our world and the challenges confronting us demand a novel strategy for problem solving, one that involves radical interdisciplinary collaboration, emphasizes integrative approaches, and centers the human experience.

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Rackham’s Interdisciplinary Problem Solving Initiative convenes faculty from a wide range of disciplines across the University of Michigan to tackle some of our society’s most complex challenges. It incubates research collaboration by guiding faculty teams as they develop innovative, integrative approaches—informed by humanistic, social science, and STEM expertise—to grand-challenge problems.

This initiative also offers students a highly unique educational opportunity that will enable them to stand out from the crowd. By participating in monthly interdisciplinary faculty seminars and collaborative research projects led by cross-disciplinary faculty teams, students will learn how to both leverage their disciplinary expertise and become integrative thinkers.

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Challenges

  • Real-world problem solving valorizes technical solutions, while often ignoring crucial perspectives brought by humanistic, artistic, and social science experts.
  • STEM, social science, humanities, and arts faculty do not share the same approaches to problems, questions, methods, or research outputs.
  • The University of Michigan organizes itself into separate schools and colleges, which in turn are divided into separate departments and programs. This structure hinders the radical cross-disciplinary collaboration, research, and teaching necessary for tackling today’s grand challenges. 
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What Does the Rackham Initiative Offer?

  • With its broad reach and deep knowledge across every school and college at the University of Michigan, as well as its mission to serve all graduate students and faculty, Rackham is uniquely positioned within the university’s ecosystem to support radical interdisciplinary research and problem solving.
  • Rackham has built expertise to guide faculty from widely disparate fields through the process of developing a shared understanding of a problem, learning how to communicate across different disciplinary norms, establishing trust, and designing collaborative research projects with real-world deliverables.
  • Rackham offers scaffolding and resources that support interdisciplinary faculty groups in developing an integrative, research- and teaching-based approach to solving grand-challenge problems.
  • At present, the initiative typically incubates two projects at a time, on a four-year cycle. It convenes teams of five to eight faculty from different disciplines across the University of Michigan around a grand-challenge problem, leads them through the development of collaborative research projects and teaching, identifies possible external funding sources, spearheads the grant-writing process, and sees through the first stages of research deliverables.

A Typical 4-Year Cycle Might Include

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    Year 1

    Monthly seminar to grapple with a grand-challenge problem, surface disciplinary assumptions, develop shared language and understanding, design research projects.

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    Year 2

    Monthly interdisciplinary research group meetings to report and provide feedback on early stage research; develop interdisciplinary courses for undergraduate or graduate students.

  • Icon of a document with a folded corner and a magnifying glass overlay, indicating document search or file preview.

    Year 3

    Monthly interdisciplinary research group meetings to report and provide feedback on ongoing research projects; teach interdisciplinary courses; invite select students to participate in research lab(s).

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    Year 4

    Monthly interdisciplinary research group meetings to report and provide feedback on ongoing research deliverables; teach interdisciplinary courses; invite select students to participate in research lab(s).

Current Work

Our Team