Donald Chi Shares What He Learned About Interdisciplinary Research at IAPHS Pre-Conference Workshop
Posted: 12/6/2019 (CSDE in the News)
In an IAPHS blog post “Traversing Divides: Interdisciplinary Research in Population Health and Health Disparities” CSDE Affiliate and Professor of Oral Health Sciences Donald Chi shares what he learned about building interdisciplinary research at the IAPHS Pre-Conference Workshop in October. In the post, Chi draws connections between his interdisciplinary experiences in children’s oral health inequalities with the activities related to interdisciplinary collaboration at the pre-conference. For example, Chi details an opportunity from the conference in which participants mentored a group of interdisciplinary scholars using idea trees. The idea trees exercise demonstrated multiple disciplinary insights on certain subjects. Chi connected this to his work on health inequality and how he will use the ideas trees exercise in the future.
Chi concludes his post with the following observation “[Traversing Divides Pre-conference] also gave me an appreciation for the importance of stepping out of one’s own disciplinary comfort zone. We face looming population health problems. So much progress that has yet to be made will come from scientists who can skillfully traverse disciplinary divides…”