This feature by SEED encapsulates the emerging multidisciplinary scientist and how boundaries are being crossed to achieve breakthroughs:

“So it’s not surprising that some of today’s most innovative scientific thinkers are making breakthroughs by hybridizing multiple fields…By drawing upon the techniques, insights, or standard models of other scientific fields, these individuals are redefining their own. Among them are a computer scientist who rethought the concept of information after studying immune systems; an archaeologist who believes material culture is an important driver of human cognitive evolution; and an astronomer who has discovered how to take an MRI of the cosmos”

The feature highlights questions that I have been wrestling with and a conversation with an epidemiologist from Imperial about the future of complexity.

I asked him how much he thought complexity was going to shape the natural and social sciences. Whether complexity science should be a discipline in its own right or whether its methods and tools will simply become part of the scientist’s intellectual armoury that they apply in their specialist discipline. Or whether we need people who actually specialise in complexity science and apply it from the ‘outside’ i.e. they may not be a trained biologist but they apply the methods of complexity science in biology so they bring another perspective for the biologist.

The epidemiologist like all enlightened thinkers said those “questions are big ones!”

What is clear is that complexity has facilitated an integrated approach to science – it has created conversations and connections between different disciplines because that is the nature of complexity. All of this makes the future of research even more exciting, if it was possible to be even more exciting!