Strategic Priority #1
Prioritize the Pursuit of Hard Questions Affecting Multiple Disciplines and Global Issues
GOAL: We will prioritize the hard questions within and across our disciplines, to enable new breakthroughs and to better understand the world’s complexity.
STRATEGIES
- Encourage and support ambitious grant and fellowship proposals to bring resources and raise the profile of faculty and students’ most impactful ideas.
- Build a culture of mentorship in which students and scholars are supported to take the risk of pursuing truly ambitious projects.
- Seek opportunities for cluster and area-specific hiring that would power major intellectual work.
- Collaborate with foundations, industry and government programs in areas where a consensus is building to address hard questions
- Strategically use seed funding, fellowships, and visitor positions to foster new ideas
- Collaborate with centers, institutes, departments and schools to create competitive funding opportunities to support both major projects; prioritize seed funding for cutting edge ideas.
EXAMPLE QUESTIONS
- How do organisms change their environment; how does environment change organisms?
- How can we revitalize civil discourse, democratic governance, and the bonds of community over time, and at distances both close and far?
- What is the fundamental composition of the universe? How can new understandings be harnessed to create new possibilities?
- In a time of ever-more-available data and more sophisticated correlation analysis, how can causation be studied at scale and across subjects?
- How can our scholarship across disciplines contribute to a more peaceful world and reduce global conflict?
- How can we best equip people to learn across their whole lives? Are there insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, from history, literature, and the arts that should be guiding us?