Conference will explore UW-Madison’s Cluster Hiring Initiative

This Thursday and Friday, March 1-2, scholars from a variety of fields will gather to discuss their collaborations at the second annual Wisconsin Conference on Interdisciplinary Cluster Hiring Case Study. The event, which will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days at the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St., is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. It is open to the public.

The conference will focus on the university’s Cluster Hiring Initiative as a landmark case study, evaluate its present successes, and look toward the future of such interdisciplinary efforts on the Madison campus. Panels will highlight key themes of collaborative research and curriculum building, as well as outreach and extra-curricular programming.

In 1998, in an effort to bolster faculty hiring, former UW–Madison Chancellor David Ward created and implemented the university’s innovative interdisciplinary teaching and research program known as the Cluster Hiring Initiative. The program, which received substantial state support, supplemented traditional hiring efforts with new hiring focused on emerging fields that cut across many disciplines. To date, the initiative has authorized 49 clusters involving 144 faculty positions in a variety of emerging areas of knowledge, such as agroecology, genomics, food safety, global governance and international finance, medical technology and religious studies.

Conference keynote speakers include Veronica Boix Mansilla, principal investigator of the Harvard Interdisciplinary Studies Project; Thanassis Rikakis, director of the Arts Media and Engineering (AME) Program at Arizona State University; and Norka Ruiz Bravo, deputy director or extramural research at the National Institutes of Health.