14. March 2006 16:22
New research institute to cross disciplinary boundaries
The first European research unit dedicated to fundamental cross-disciplinary research has been launched with support from the ESF (European Science Foundation). The new Institute Para Limes (IPL) based in the Netherlands will bring together top scientists including Nobel Laureates with aspiring younger researchers across a wide range of disciplines to focus on fundamental questions. On the 15th-17th March the founders of IPL will convene in Strasbourg to set up and mandate the first working groups to start the exploration.
The activities initiated by the institute will include both emerging fields of research requiring collaboration across multiple disciplines, and also broad topics of immediate concern to the world, according to Jan Vasbinder, one of the initiators of IPL. “Through that type of approach we will be able to support solutions for very relevant questions for the future of humanity,” said Vasbinder.
One such question may be finding new combination of renewable resources and technologies for mitigating carbon emissions from fossil fuels, including changes in manmade systems. “Exploring new revolutionary combinations of science that will be at the core of IPL will be very important here”. Vasbinder said
The IPL will also strive to establish multi-disciplinary science as a field in its own right spawning new avenues of research. The model for IPL is the highly acclaimed Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, USA, which has already shown that multiple disciplines can be melded to create new fruitful directions for research. This happened in the fast expanding field of computational biology, which the Santa Fe Institute helped to create by bringing together mathematicians, physicists and information scientists.
Vasbinder believes there are plenty of new areas for multi-disciplinary research that the IPL can pursue, for example combining the social sciences with neurological research to obtain a deeper understanding of the human brain. “There is tremendous room for further understanding of the relation between the development of human cultures and the functioning of the brain,” said Vasbinder. This will be one of the first cross-disciplinary fields to be discussed at the inaugural conference hosted by the ESF in Strasbourg in March 2006.
Apart from public sources, the IPL is being funded by private individuals, and also corporate sponsors who can participate on a year by year basis, typically for a payment of €50,000. The aim is to expand funding year by year to reach the eventual target budget of around €5 million by 2011.
The intention is to keep the institute relatively small, with most of the scientists working on secondment and actually paid by their permanent employers. “We’ve set up the institute along the lines of Santa Fe, with no more than 100 to 120 scientists involved and limited to 30 to 40 people active at any time, including visiting researchers, resident scientists and other staff,” said Vasbinder.
The structure of individual workgroups though is critical, and again like Santa Fe, the aim is to combine the experience of scientists already proven in their own fields with the energy of younger researchers aspiring to produce original work within the IPL’s new inter-disciplinary framework. “We want the combination of scientists who perhaps have already earned their Nobel Prize and now want to expand into broader horizons with younger people aged 35 to 45 who have the energy to do really hard work in these new fields,” said Vasbinder.
The IPL began operation in January 2006. In 2007 the institute will move into the Mariëngaarde convent in the city of Doesbrurg, in the Netherlands. On 15th-17th March, a meeting will be held in Strasbourg between founders of the institute. This meeting, hosted by the ESF, will be the first in a series of meetings across Europe and will be the starting point of the everyday activities of the institute.
Contact
Mr. Jan Wouter Vasbindertypo3/esf_contacts_form.php?mail=4a8bc09db44410d54825029b983ca5bc
