Getting out of the way: how ‘water cooler’ moments drive academic innovation

Universities have various strategies for maximising their research impact through interdisciplinary projects. They can invest in bricks-and-mortar infrastructure, developing multi-function labs. They can inaugurate institutes that pool academic talent from across the spectrum of scientific knowledge to work on real-world problems, such as climate crisis, the application of AI, and healthcare. Others might see recruitment, or internal career advancement incentives, as the answer. Partnerships with like-minded institutions can inspire collaborative projects, too.

But universities cannot always engineer interdisciplinary collaborations. Harold Collard, vice-chancellor of research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), says there has to be room for these collaborations to happen naturally. UCSF is one of the leading biomedical research centres in the US, and its strategy for encouraging interdisciplinary science is to put its scientists together and let them talk.

“Honestly, the main strategy we take is to try to stay out of the way of the innately collaborative impulse and nature of our faculty,” says Collard. “[Research], when properly framed and supported, is an inherently collaborative and curious enterprise.” 

As a health sciences campus, UCSF’s researchers are driven by a sense of mission, by the desire to find groundbreaking discoveries that can transform human health. UCSF’s Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Center developed a “pacemaker for the brain” that may one day stop the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in their tracks. In a project funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers applied CRISPR gene-editing technology to fight cancer, engineering fat cells that starve cancerous cells, generating hope for a new generation of cellular therapies.

“What we’ve tried to create here is an environment that removes administrative barriers to interdisciplinarity, and fosters and elevates – and recognises – the value and importance of the inherent desire of faculty to collaborate across traditional academic boundaries,” says Collard.

Collard believes that if the environment is right, everything else can fall into place. A university’s over-arching strategy for interdisciplinary research need not be so rigid or mandated from top-down. It is about allowing “the water cooler moment” to happen and ensuring that researchers have the opportunity to pursue their scientific curiosity together.

“It’s the moment before or after a conference where you run into a colleague from a different department and your interest is sparked in a short walk together,” says Collard. “It’s about facilitating ways in which that kind of random interaction between people from different backgrounds leads to insight and innovation in a way that wouldn’t be prompted by a colleague who’s working directly with you already in your lab.”

Universities might already have the resources – the labs, the funding, the intellectual firepower – but where the seed of innovation really takes root is when scientists can have conversations.

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