Faculty Perspectives: The impact of interdisciplinary, collaborative research opportunities on scholarly trajectories

By Edward Balleisen and Meghan O’Neil  

 In February 2022 we are featuring Bass Connections as part of an exploration of research that crosses boundaries.

Duke faculty and students test a new laparoscopic surgery device in Uganda

Faculty play essential roles on Bass Connections teams. They cook up project proposals (though occasionally, graduate students or even undergraduates initiate an idea). They provide intellectual and organizational leadership to the team. They tap their networks of academics and community partners to engage in research. And they provide sustained guidance and mentorship to students, many of whom are just beginning to learn research methods and skills. Yet the great majority of faculty currently receive no teaching credit for their work leading Bass Connections project teams. Why then, do between 150 and 200 faculty members sign up for the program every year?  Motivations vary, though surveys and focus groups reveal several overarching patterns. One key attraction has been the ability to draw on the talents of students to expand the scale and scope of research activity.  

For early career faculty, project teams offer an excellent way to test new research ideas, develop new models of care, and build sufficient pilot data for external grant proposals. Several engineering professors have organized teams to focus on the challenges of moving technical innovations into use, with some students working on regulatory issues and others on the development of business models. Environmental scientists have built teams that investigate how to use a new technology, like drones, to reshape techniques for monitoring environmental conditions in ecologically fragile or tough-to-reach areas. In the arts and humanities, teams have enabled professors to pursue large-scale digital projects, build oral history collections, or mount ambitious public exhibits. 

Duke faculty and students conduct a focus group with refugees

Community-engaged scholars have used Bass Connections to deepen partnerships with external organizations and implement evidence-based social improvements. Project teams have facilitated such varied undertakings as an ethnographic observation of patients in a Ugandan hospital to identify and mitigate post-operative infections, evaluation of the impacts of a music program on the social development of autistic children, and creation of new modes of social service delivery for low-income residents in Durham. Faculty who engage with governance have pulled together teams to undertake the comprehensive analysis necessary to generate detailed recommendations for a North Carolina task force on Medicaid policy and key regulatory considerations for the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. 

Opening of an art exhibit cultivated by a team of faculty and students

In other cases, faculty have chosen to lead a team out of intellectual curiosity or a desire to experiment with new forms of pedagogy. One team brought together a neuroscientist, an ophthalmologist, and an art historian, who, together with a group of students with wildly divergent intellectual interests, embarked on a three-year set of projects to investigate the interconnections among the biology and psychology of visual perception and the techniques of the visual arts. The key outputs were a series of exhibits at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art. Other team leaders emphasized design thinking techniques, often in full partnership with external collaborators. One such endeavor worked closely with teachers and parents at a local elementary school to construct computer science standards for K-8 education in North Carolina, along with a community-centered instructional guide.

A pedagogical approach rooted in the cultivation of collaborative, applied, interdisciplinary project-based inquiry will not resonate with every faculty member, or even a majority of professors in all departments and schools. Indeed, some faculty with a strong disciplinary orientation or a deep commitment to research targeted at scholarly peers have voiced concerns about undergraduates or Ph.D. students having extensive engagement with applied, interdisciplinary projects. This group of scholars worries about what they see as a trend toward excessive pre-professionalism for undergraduates and a threat to intellectual exploration across the liberal arts. With regard to Ph.D. advising, some faculty have seen time spent on applied, collaborative inquiry as a distraction from core training, deep specialization, and a focus on publication for academic audiences. 

Our extensive assessment efforts provide ample evidence of the program’s impact on students and faculty. But that’s as a complement to other modes of instruction and training rooted in disciplinary methods and analysis, including lectures, seminars, labs, and individual research exercises. 

As we are approaching the program’s tenth year, we have also tracked longer-term benefits for participating faculty. In addition to the frequent development of strong mentoring relationships with students that endure well beyond the project team experience, more than two-thirds of faculty report that Bass Connections has had a positive impact on their teaching more generally. For many faculty, these teams have opened new avenues of research, accelerated publications for academic and broader audiences, deepened external partnerships, and led to significant external grant funding. 

A visualization of how faculty have leveraged Bass Connections projects 

The Bass Connections website includes numerous faculty reflections, including posts about their experiences leading year-long research teams, some excerpts: 

• Geraldine Dawson, William Cleland Distinguished Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development  We have had incredibly bright, motivated students working on the project, and I’ve learned that if you can use your leadership and expertise to leverage student engagement, these teams act as great idea incubators and a nice way to stay connected to the Duke undergraduate community. 

• Lavanya Vasudevan, Assistant Professor of Community and Family Medicine For me, the best part about the experience has been the new connections – with students, faculty and community partners, with whom I would otherwise not have had the opportunity to interact. The influx of new ideas and perspectives has been enriching, and it is very exciting to consider the new avenues of research that have opened up as a result. 

• Emily Bernhardt, Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of Biology and Professor of Environmental Sciences and Policy  This [Bass Connections project] has introduced an entirely new research effort for my lab group, allowing us to apply our tools in biogeochemistry and ecosystem science to a new problem of the Anthropocene… We expect to generate several high-profile papers and to have sufficient information to go after a much larger grant to continue and expand upon this research on Hg pollution associated with artisanal gold mining in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. 

• Mark Borsuk, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering  The Bass Connections project has opened my eyes to the potential of fully inquiry-based, student-initiated teaching, learning and research. In addition to being an incredible experience itself, [Bass Connections] has also informed the way I teach my more ‘conventional’ classes by identifying new ways to engage students in their own education.  

• John French, Professor of History One of the things that has been the most exciting [about our Bass Connections project team] has been student engagement. This is especially true on the part of the three graduate students who have impacted our research direction. These students have begun dissertation projects oriented around our research; we’ve had an undergraduate writing an honors thesis directly related to our team’s work; and a few members of our team have received small grants to continue their research.  

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