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Postdoctoral Associate Sara Glade presents her research from the Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity IRT to Acting Dean Keith Molenaar at the April event.

The slide deck is part of presentations given by IRT directors on accomplishments and activity within their themes to date. They include details on funding results, important research findings and other lessons learned from the initiative. The April event also included a poster and networking session for students and faculty involved in the initiative.

Acting Associate Dean for Research Shideh Dashti also serves as the director of the Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity theme. She presented at the event and said it was a great chance for the community to celebrate the excellent work done in the themes.

“We are making these slides publicly available because there is a lot of good information about the work that was done under this initiative and because they provide great lessons on teaming and interdisciplinary research in our college,” she said.

The Interdisciplinary Research Theme initiative began in 2018 as a way to bring faculty, staff and students together to build on the college’s research strengths and align with future large-scale funding opportunities. Since then, the themes have helped researchers coordinate faculty hires, share facilities, and provided seed funding to leverage work that could provide transformational societal impact.

The blitz served as an official end to the first iteration of the initiative. The themes – in their current configuration – will officially be sunset on July 1. Dashti said that the college will soon begin to review and quantify the impact of the themes over their life cycle.

“I anticipate the college will continue to support interdisciplinary research going forward and that the new dean will have a great deal of input and perspective on that topic when they arrive,” Dashti said. “So now is a great time to both review the IRT model as a whole and to consider what the next version of support and teaming from the college level looks like. Anyone with ideas or perspective on those topics is welcome to contact me.”

  Home page for the Interdisciplinary Research Theme initiative