On 'interdisciplinary sabbatical,' professors remain at Tufts

    Opting to forego the traditional route of traveling across the country or the world on a sabbatical, Professor of Computer Science Carla Brodley took a significantly shorter trip during her time off from regular teaching duties — she headed just across the Charles River, to Tufts' Boston campus.
    After meeting with professionals at the School of Medicine a couple years ago, Brodley envisioned her skills in computer science playing a valuable role in furthering the doctors' research. An upcoming sabbatical, typically taken every seven years by many Tufts faculty members, presented her with a chance to put those ideas into practice.
    Brodley's self-titled "interdisciplinary sabbatical" kept her within the university, and this practice of staying close to home is gaining supporters.
    Already a petri dish for interdisciplinary collaboration, the university is extending its multidisciplinary opportunities to sabbaticals so that professors can team up with Tufts colleagues from completely different fields of study and establish extensive research cooperation.
    Faculty members on sabbatical typically spend a semester or two at another university or in a research center unaffiliated with Tufts. Under this new approach, a faculty member would collaborate with Tufts experts from other disciplines only a few miles — or across the Academic Quad — from the comfort of his or her office.
    Brodley said her idea to partner with the medical school received enthusiastic approval from the head of her department and from Provost and Senior Vice President Jamshed Bharucha.
    Bharucha called the sabbatical a successful stepping-stone to increasing productive interactions among faculty.
    "I place a lot of value on the collaboration across the schools at Tufts," Bharucha said, adding that it has great potential to spark new research. Brodley's interdisciplinary sabbatical "was a pilot that worked extremely well," he said.
    "I would consider supporting another faculty member if another came along," he added.
    Not all research concentrations equally benefit from the interdisciplinary sabbatical that the provost envisions. Brodley spent the 2008-2009 academic year exploring how machine-learning could be applied to automate a process that screens thousands of scholarly article abstracts for medical research purposes, she said.
    Taking this kind of sabbatical "requires wanting to collaborate, but also having interests that make sense to collaborate," Bharucha said.
    Though Brodley remains the only faculty member to have taken an interdisciplinary sabbatical at Tufts thus far, many professors around the university are interested in following her lead.
    Eric Miller, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, is four years away from eligibility for a sabbatical and said that an in-house break could be "a viable, enriching experience."
    A year off from teaching offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in a completely unfamiliar field of study, and faculty generally travel far from their usual environment, said Miller, who is already collaborating with the medical school.
    At Tufts, he said, one need not walk far to travel light-years away in a scholarly sense.
    "It's important to be as close to the data as possible, to be where the problems are," he said.
    Brodley credited the ongoing success of her sabbatical project to working on site directly with her collaborators at the medical school and physically close to where research is conducted; she still travels to the medical school for the project once a week.
    Professor of Biomedical Engineering Sergio Fantini called interdisciplinary sabbaticals "a fantastic idea" because they allow a professor to dedicate more time to research or gaining expertise in an area related to his or her existing multidisciplinary research.
    Fantini said that faculty can profit more from interdisciplinary projects by taking an active role in understanding the work of their research partners.
    "It is much more effective if you have a better understanding of what others are doing, and [that] would make collaboration more efficient to investigate new avenues of research on your own," Fantini said.
    Outside of sabbaticals, interdisciplinary collaboration already occurs at Tufts on a daily basis.
    "I am always doing interdisciplinary work — that is my everyday life," Professor of Child Development Marina Bers said.
    While many faculty members already work across disciplines, a sabbatical would allow researchers the chance to get to know collaborators from other academic fields, Bers said.
    "There is a lot of talk about multidisciplinary research as part of the Tufts experience," Miller said. "It's a small, collegial university where it's easy to talk to people, a place where crossing borders to do research is easy to do."
    Just sitting and talking with a faculty member from a different discipline could result in "serendipity," or the sparking of a new collaborative idea previously unimaginable, Miller added.
    "You are stretched to think about things you wouldn't normally think about," Brodley said.