One thing you notice working at Stanford is how close you are to other areas of research. A short lunchtime walk from the medical school campus can involve coffee at the School of Engineering or a sandwich at the business school.
This proximity matters for more than just lunch. Many important medical advances have come out of collaborations between faculty members from very different backgrounds. These collaborations have produced medical technologies, revealed the inner working of our brains, and generated strategies for solving international health crisis, and that’s just collaborations involving medical school faculty.
Institutes across Stanford support similarly interdisciplinary approaches to solving many of the grand challenges we face today in environmental research, security, economic policy and energy. Technology like virtual reality (above) is being applied to environmental research, questions of empathy, and athletics.
We’ve collected many of these stories and videos of boundary-crossing research on a new website that chronicles the results of venturing outside departmental silos. We've launched with stories about decision-making, water policy, intersections with the arts, and interdisciplinary undergraduate research, all of which span schools and departments to tackle real world problems.
Photo of virtual reality research by Linda Cicero
