MEDIA: The Secrets to Sucessful Interdisciplinary Work

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA: Popular website showcases research on how to best venture out of the comfort zone of your own discipline. The original article is co-authored by Center Steering Group member Timo Minssen. 

The original article is entitled Ten Simple Rules for a Successful Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration and answers how and why theoretical and wet scientists can work together.
The authors make the following suggestions:

1. Enjoy Entering a Completely New Field of Research
2. Go to the Wet Lab
3. Different Fields Have Different Terminologies: Learn the Language
4. Different Fields Move at Different Speeds: Do not Become Impatient
5. Different Fields Have Different Reward Models: Know What You Can Expect
6. Learn What Different Fields Mean by “Data”
7. Assess the Advantages and Disadvantages of Service Work
8. Create and Manage Structural Bonds
9. Recognise When Things Are Not Working Well
10. Be Synergistic

The Times Higher Education website highlights the need for such skills since:

"funders and the nature of many of today’s most crucial challenges are pushing more and more researchers towards interdisciplinary work."

The website receives approximately 767,000 individual readers per month, communicating Center for Synbio research to a broad audience. 

Read the original article here
Read the Times Higher Education article here