The Center for Science and Society brings together scholars, students, and practitioners across fields inside and outside of academia to:
- Break down traditional disciplinary silos
- Create new interdisciplinary models of teaching and collaboration
- Support scientific research and engagement driven by community knowledge and needs
- Enhance public understanding of science and its relation to pressing social issues
Background
Climate change, healthcare, and technological innovation; these challenges can’t be solved by the natural sciences or the humanities alone. Today’s university must look beyond its campus and combine research, teaching, and outreach to confront these challenges from all sides, understanding that meaningful knowledge exchange happens in the process, not just the product.
Community participation can drive research; faculty gain insights from their students’ lived experiences; and learning is not limited to a classroom. These impacts are magnified when participants come from different fields.
Interdisciplinarity’s importance may seem obvious. Yet universities are built around departmental silos. The opportunity to work and learn with people from across fields and outside communities is rare. To meet the challenges ahead, we must build a university that supports and sustains collaborative inquiry.
Since 2014, the Center for Science and Society has helped remove the barriers to interdisciplinary and collaborative work through programming, funding opportunities, and community building.
Programming
The Center’s work is organized around themes, not departmental affiliations. Programming includes:
- The Co-Production of Knowledge Initiative, which seeks to redistribute power and resources from researchers to communities
- The Science and Society minor, which equips undergraduate students to examine how science and technology shape–and are shaped by–society
- Over 50 events per year, from large lectures to smaller workshops and lunches
Funding Opportunities
The Center’s innovative grant programs help fill the gap between scholarship and practice
- Many of the Center’s grant programs are the first of their kind at Columbia University.
- The Center has distributed over $300,000 across 100+ grant projects
- Most grants are awarded to students, providing them with an opportunity to investigate science and society outside the classroom
Community Building
The Center serves as an incubator for interdisciplinary thought and action.
- Student events and other resources provide informal opportunities to debate and connect across departments
- Center faculty provide mentorship and guidance to students and early-career scholars
- Across a campus of 40,000+ people, the Center is a hub for interdisciplinary resources across the university
Learn more via our impact webpage.
The Center provides the administrative support and intellectual space to bring people together from across and beyond the university, ask multifaceted questions, and seek new solutions.
