Professor Joyce Tait is Director of the ESRC's Innogen Centre (Innovation in Genomics) which is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. This is an interdisciplinary programme which brings together social scientists, technology and policy analysts, economists and lawyers to study the far-reaching social and economic implications of advances in the life sciences.
"I've had a very varied and exciting interdisciplinary career, mainly as an academic, with a short spell as a policy maker and adviser working for Scottish Natural Heritage. Taking an interdisciplinary career path can be much more uncertain and more risky than concentrating on a single discipline - you can spend three years working across a range of disciplines while your colleagues have spent the same length of time improving their career prospects by working on much more narrowly focused research. Even though the ESRC now gives a lot more emphasis to interdisciplinary research, single disciplines are still calling the shots.
Also, being married with three young children in the 1970s when I started my academic career, I was less able to move around to find the ideal job for me. Being interdisciplinary allowed me to keep open a wide range of career options. And now that interdisciplinary research is in much more demand, I've been asked by ESRC and the European Commission to advise on how to manage and evaluate interdisciplinary research.
One big advantage of bringing together researchers from different research backgrounds is that the outputs are usually much more relevant to the needs of users. I was always keen to have strong 'user engagement' in my research. And I think it has stood me in good stead in running the Innogen programme which calls for a variety of skills. We are looking at science and industry strategies, policy and regulation, and stakeholder and public needs and concerns and it’s my job as Director to make sure that this rich variety of perspectives is well integrated at the end of the day. It's often very useful to have a background in science for a research programme like this (my first degree was in pharmaceutical chemistry), particularly when working with scientists, industry managers and policymakers.
My current job as director of the Innogen Centre is the best I have ever had. Apart from having an exciting and varied programme of research funded by ESRC (about £2 million) our staff are very successfully bringing in additional funded research (about another £1 million so far). I'm particularly pleased that about a third of this has come from projects run by natural scientists who have asked our researchers to join them. Strong engagement with policy makers is another really rewarding aspect of the job. It's been a bit of a random walk getting here, but if I'd had enough foresight at the beginning of my career, this is what I would have been aiming for.
But, yes, of course there have been, and still are, some difficulties in doing interdisciplinary research - you still occasionally meet researchers strongly committed to a single discipline who will tell you in no uncertain terms to "get off my patch". And, yes, there are some drawbacks in being an academic, particularly for younger researchers working on 'soft money'. For all that, I would, as they say, recommend academic life to my grandchildren (my children having taken other paths)."