Distinctively Duke: Ed Balleisen on What’s Special About Our Interdisciplinary Approach

Ed Balleisen, Duke’s senior vice provost for interdisciplinary programs and initiatives, is wrapping up his term as he prepares to take on the role of provost and executive vice president of academic affairs of the George Washington University on July 1. 

Since 2015, Balleisen has led the university’s efforts to advance interdisciplinarity, partnering with academic leaders across campus. We asked him to reflect on what makes Duke’s interdisciplinary approach distinctive. 

• Read related stories in Interdisciplinary Spirit, a new digital magazine from the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs.

What would you like people to know about interdisciplinary programs and initiatives at Duke?

Duke has created a truly robust interdisciplinary ecosystem. There are many elements to that — pieces involving research, education and engagement.

With regard to research, we have wide-ranging mechanisms across our interdisciplinary units that foster innovative, boundary-crossing inquiry. These include tiered seed grants such as lower-level Intellectual Community Planning Grants and Bass Connections teams that function as a kind of midlevel seed grant. Many of our units also provide seed grants of one kind or another, like the Duke Global Health Institute.

Beyond that, we have the Multiyear Interdisciplinary Hubs, which provide really substantial funding — $400,000 a year for three years — that can drive much more substantial research undertakings.

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Complementary to all of that seed grant funding, we also have a wide-ranging set of working groups within our interdisciplinary units. Many of them connect faculty who didn’t previously know each other and foster new collaborations.

We have a robust set of educational opportunities: a wide array of interdisciplinary certificate programs for undergraduates, graduate students and professional students alike. We have three highly successful master’s programs in our interdisciplinary units — the Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science, the Master in Applied Ethics and Policy and the Global Health Master — that give students the chance to integrate and apply knowledge across disciplinary lines and across schools.

We also have an interdisciplinary co-major in global health and so many cocurricular avenues, whether through clubs related to energy, environment and sustainability, startup competitions, ethics-related groups or AI hackathons. There are lots of summer research experiences — the +Programs, summer research in global health, the Kenan Institute’s summer offerings, DukeEngage. 

With regard to engagement, there are deep connections to policymakers in key areas like energy, sustainability and healthcare — connections fostered by places like the Nicholas Institute or the Margolis Institute for Health Policy. We also have growing connections to community organizations in Durham and beyond, many catalyzed by the Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship.

We work hard to integrate these different areas. The ecosystem isn’t just each of these domains in isolation. It’s the relationships and connections across them that I think are really special at Duke.

And because we have such a rich ecosystem, it attracts and retains faculty. Faculty come here because of this ecosystem, they contribute to it and they stay because of it. Increasingly, students are coming to Duke at all levels because of it as well. Undergraduates come because they know about DukeEngage and Bass Connections, and graduate and professional students come because of the opportunities that this interdisciplinary ecosystem affords them. That’s a real strength for Duke.

What exemplifies the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration here at Duke?

One example that comes to mind involves one of the ways that faculty make unexpected intellectual connections. The second is a more collective event that really speaks to the spirit of collaboration.

Every year the Office for Faculty Advancement and the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs organize lunches for new faculty who express an interest in meeting peers from across campus. These are just informal get-togethers and they’re mostly an opportunity for those faculty to learn a bit about their peers who are starting at the same time, but also to ask questions about how Duke works.

Sometimes they can lead to cross-cutting research collaborations just because people find out they share an interest. This year at one of those lunches, we had a professor of English and a nursing professor discover that they both study aspects of stigma — either the cultural aspects of stigma, how people use that in literature, or the social and health aspects of stigma, because these things can be really problematic for treating specific kinds of diseases and health conditions.

Those two faculty members are now pulling other faculty into a very substantial collaboration around the problem of stigma. It generated an Intellectual Community Planning Grant, and they’re hoping to join forces for all kinds of research projects. It may have educational implications as well. I think that’s fantastic.

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The second example I’ll offer is an annual occasion that occurs in mid-April, and that’s the Bass Connections Showcase. It brings together hundreds of students, faculty, staff and members of community organizations who have taken part in one team or another across the year, or who are just coming to see what their peers have accomplished.

It’s a wonderful celebration. You have students presenting through posters or interactive displays the work they’ve done for the year. They’re proud of what they’ve done, and they’re sharing it with anyone who comes by. It’s a wonderful culmination of the interdisciplinary collaborations that are occurring day in and day out across campus. And sometimes it even drives ideas for new collaborations among faculty and graduate students.

What’s special about interdisciplinary research, education and engagement at Duke? 

It’s a great question. You’ll struggle now to find any college or university that doesn’t tout interdisciplinary undertakings by its faculty and students. And they do have a lot of interdisciplinary undertakings. It’s just part of the water we now swim in within the higher education sector.

Very few other universities, though, offer the breadth of interdisciplinary activity that Duke has across all of its schools, or the scale of opportunities that exist for students. The latter includes not just a robust array of courses and certificates at all levels but also Program II, through which undergraduates can design their own interdisciplinary majors, or the array of interdepartmental majors that we provide.

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We also have an increasing number of interdisciplinary master’s programs. Those aren’t just the ones that are run by interdisciplinary units — many now exist within our schools. For example, we have a new master’s program focused on business and sustainability that’s a joint endeavor between the Business School and the School of the Environment.

So there are such a variety of opportunities for students. And then we have signature programs like Bass Connections, DukeEngage and the summer “plus” programs. Together, they run somewhere along the lines of 125 interdisciplinary research teams each year, involving well over a thousand students if you include all of those programs together.

This is happening at scale, and I think that’s not unprecedented, but it is distinctive.

And here’s something that I think is even more distinctively Duke: We systematically blend interdisciplinary research with educational offerings, with a heavy emphasis on experiential learning. That level of intentional integration really stands out.

The landscape of interdisciplinary units is always evolving. What are some recent developments?

Intellectual currents are constantly changing. New opportunities emerge, and there’s only so much money to go around. So we try to be thoughtful about how best to provide opportunities for our faculty and students and how to connect most effectively with partners beyond campus.

We conduct robust reviews periodically. In 2020–2021, we carried out a comprehensive review of all of our interdisciplinary units within the Provost’s Office, and that led us to merge two units to create the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

More recently, we’ve seen a need to deepen our capacity for community-engaged work. In partnership with Duke’s Office of Community Affairs, we established the Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship.

Sometimes we also reboot things. We’ve relaunched the Cook Center on Social Equity, and we’ve added three multiyear interdisciplinary hubs after an extremely competitive selection process.

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We also saw an opportunity to tap into external funding and used that to create Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Collaboratives, which bring graduate and professional students together around shared interdisciplinary interests, such as society-centered AI.

The same creativity is happening within our schools. Trinity College of Arts & Sciences has created a SPACE Initiative that isn’t just focused on the science and technology aspects of innovation in space, but also looks at the policy dimensions and cultural implications.

We also have a Society-Centered AI Initiative within Trinity, which is the group that proposed one of our Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Collaboratives. There’s similar momentum in the School of Medicine around using AI to improve healthcare delivery and health-related research.

There are many initiatives within the School of Engineering as well, including one focused on reducing the costs associated with AI through the development of new kinds of computer chips that could lower both the expense and the environmental impact of AI.

This kind of activity is very much part of what makes Duke special. It requires not just an openness to invest in new ideas, but also a willingness to recognize when older configurations — ones that may have achieved wonderful things but are no longer as valuable in the moment — might need to be scaled back or even sunset.

For people who are curious about finding new partners to collaborate with, what would you suggest?

There are so many good avenues to explore at Duke. I would encourage people to check out the websites provided by all of our university‑wide interdisciplinary units and the many interdisciplinary programs that exist within Duke schools.

Those websites provide lots of information about entry points, about the working groups that already exist and about funding opportunities. They also indicate who the leadership of these units are, and those individuals are always willing to meet with people, hear about their interests and connect them in ways that might introduce them to potential partners.

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There’s the opportunity to do internet searching to see which faculty members or graduate students share interests — not just at Duke but also at other universities, especially those that are close by in the Triangle.

Once you discover someone who has an intellectual agenda that seems to intersect in some way with your own, you can reach out and say, “Hey, let’s have coffee, let’s have lunch.” Most people are receptive to that kind of inquiry.

For students, I would encourage them to consider participation in interdisciplinary programs like Bass Connections or DukeEngage, along with the many student clubs that focus on interdisciplinary issues. It’s a great way to try out a new configuration or explore a new area of interest.

What do you hope readers will take away from the stories in our office’s new magazine?

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First, that interdisciplinary research, education and engagement depend on a range of practical institutional supports that might not be immediately obvious but are essential.

Second, that sometimes it takes a while to see the fruits of that work. Sometimes you only see the results years later, either because of the evolution of the research or, more often, because of the impact it has on individuals with regard to career discernment or intellectual passion.

And third, that the practical institutional supports I just mentioned only matter because incredibly talented and committed people take advantage of them. It’s their stories that really bring Duke’s interdisciplinary world to life.

Main image: Ed Balleisen provides welcoming remarks during the 2026 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase. (Photo: Les Todd)