Feature Perspectives on Interdisciplinary Science Education Interdisciplinarity: The Right People, a Supportive Place, and a Program Emerges

Twenty-first-century biology is inherently interdisciplinary. Every aspect of biology, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems, is richly informed by the physical, mathematical, and computational sciences. Interdisciplinarity is a buzzword in biology education, and understandably so, for the ma-jor scientific challenges of the 21st century—climate change, global health, personalized medicine, and genetic engineer-ing, to name a few—require insights from across the natural and mathematical sciences. It is both an exciting and daunting time for biology educators—exciting because of the vast opportunity for im-portant new discoveries that will come about in an inter-disciplinary context, yet daunting for many current biology educators who were not trained within such a framework. The call for transformation of the undergraduate biology experience to better address interdisciplinarity is not new. It has been 10 years since BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists (National Research Council, 2003) channeled the growing awareness of how tech-nological advances blurred traditional disciplinary bound-aries, challenging science educators to modify how and what we teach. Recently, the American Association for the Ad-vancement of Science (2011) reissued the call in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. If our experience is any indication, even with broad inter-disciplinary buy in, understanding how best to implement interdisciplinarity into the undergraduate science and math-ematics experience is not always easy