What is convergent research and why is Boston University embracing it?

A couple of years ago, Boston officials asked environmental ecologist Lucy Hutyra if there was a way to predict whether updating building and zoning laws might help make the city more sustainable and less vulnerable to climate hazards, like increased temperatures and heat waves. Could the Boston University researcher forecast which law changes could have the biggest impact?

“We can’t do that—there’s no model that does that,” the College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor and chair of Earth and environment told them.

But the question got her thinking. Hutyra is an expert on how urbanization impacts climate and ecosystems and knows her field as well as anyone—having won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2023. She began talking with researchers both within and outside of her academic department and, together, she says, they “started to dream up ways of building new kinds of models to actually do it.” As Hutyra and her colleagues collaborated on their model, the project began drawing in more BU experts interested in climate change, including public health researchers. Soon, it had evolved to consider other aspects of climate impact, such as measuring and mitigating the effect of heat on health, and how that issue gets coupled to neighborhood design and construction.

This kind of collaboration is something that Hutyra is keen to do more of. And she hopes to take things a step further, too—not just bringing disciplines together, but also ultimately melding and merging them into something new in pursuit of a grand challenge. It’s an approach known as convergent—or convergence—research.

In convergent research, experts do more than just work alongside each other, bringing their own disciplinary knowledge. They start borrowing methods and approaches from each other, so that their fields begin to blend, or converge. Sometimes, they form entirely new research disciplines. It’s a step along from another popular research strategy, interdisciplinary, where investigators work together to advance knowledge while not necessarily integrating their respective fields.

“The questions that we were starting to ask evolved in a codevelopment framework,” says Hutyra. “In many respects, that epitomizes convergence, because we’re tackling the hardest problems, the most necessary problems, to improve the human condition, and we’re doing it in nontraditional ways, because we’ve changed what the fundamental question is, through the collaborations.”

Boston University has put itself on the path to becoming a national convergence leader, leveraging the research approach to take on climate change, infectious diseases, cancer, and other urgent societal problems and needs. In recent years, convergence has become a major draw for research funders: the National Science Foundation (NSF) has said it “gives high priority to convergence research, which focuses on addressing complex problems in science, engineering, and society.”

“Convergence is where you bring people together from different traditional disciplines who are interested in a problem or challenge for society that’s complicated and can’t be solved by one discipline,” says BU’s Kenneth R. Lutchen, senior advisor to the president, strategy and innovation. “When you put people from very different disciplines together, what emerges is a very creative and powerful approach to try to address the challenge that never would have emerged from any one of those disciplines alone.”

Lutchen, a College of Engineering professor and dean emeritus, is cochairing a new group at BU that aims to accelerate the University’s convergent research by identifying societal challenges that BU is well-placed to take on and opening up new opportunities for collaboration. The 14-person Boston University Task Force on Convergent Research and Education includes faculty drawn from fields as diverse as global studies and medicine, and sociology and biomedical engineering.

According to Gloria Waters, University provost and chief academic officer, convergence has become a key factor in recruiting new, high-caliber faculty and students to BU—all raising the University’s national reputation.

“One of the things that attracts faculty to come—and to stay—at BU is its highly collaborative environment; they really appreciate the breadth of people in different disciplines who are working on the same topic,” says Waters.

Hutyra says the freedom to work in areas beyond her traditional disciplinary training “is what makes me love my job. It’s all the amazing ideas that come from actually talking to people who are working in different fields and coming up with new ways to solve emerging problems.”

A striking physical manifestation of the University’s commitment to convergence is the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences. Designed as a vertical campus, the stunning tower is home to a BU-wide academic unit where many of the faculty have appointments that straddle data and computing fields and other academic disciplines. Like Ngozi Okidegbe, the first faculty at BU to hold a dual appointment crossing data and the law, who studies how algorithms shape the criminal justice system.

“In so many ways, Boston University is the right institution to lead in convergent research,” says BU President Melissa L. Gilliam. “Together as a community, we will aspire ambitiously to forge new fields devoted to solving the major issues of our day. As we do, we will look to the broad scope and large scale of our research operations, the strengths of each of our schools, the collaborative and generous nature of our faculty and staff, and our position in the academically rich city of Boston to guide us.”

Getting a Better View of the Brain

One place at BU where convergent research is already part of the fabric is the College of Engineering. During Lutchen’s tenure as dean, the college was reorganized into three large departments and two crosscutting divisions. Faculty were given boundary-slipping affiliations and new hires were recruited for their interest in a convergent research theme—such as energy, sustainability, and climate—rather than for a specific department.

“We realized most of society’s grand challenges are really at the intersection of multiple disciplines,” says Lutchen. “They require multiple disciplines to interact, they may require solutions using methods that won’t emerge until you put people together. We found the quality of faculty who were applying rose immediately—they loved and wanted us to embrace collaboration.”

Among those attracted to BU by this emphasis on convergence was David Boas. He’s a pioneer in neurophotonics, which combines engineering, optics, imaging, and neuroscience to study the brain. An ENG professor of biomedical engineering, Boas builds systems that use light to watch the brain in action and map neural activity. In collaborations with researchers at BU and beyond, he’s applied the technology to studies of pain during surgery, stroke recovery, and Alzheimer’s disease.

A physicist and engineer, he says that his work with BU medical researchers has induced a mutually beneficial cycle: he builds tools that they apply to health research, which can then spark new areas of study—and those new areas of study require new tools that he builds, which get applied to health research, and so on.

“That merging of two fields is just incredibly rich,” says Boas, who heads the BU Neurophotonics Center, one of 15 University-wide research centers and institutes. “You take ideas from one and apply them to the other; it allows you to look at things in a new perspective, and it goes both ways. You get that explosion of activity.”

He describes convergent research as exerting a gravitational force, drawing in more and more disciplines as the questions and approaches grow bolder.

“In my experience, BU is really unique in terms of promoting interactions across departments, across colleges,” says Boas.

That’s echoed by pulmonologist Darrell Kotton. He’s the founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), a joint effort between BU and Boston Medical Center (BU’s primary teaching hospital), which serves as a hub for stem cell biology and regenerative medicine research that convenes biologists, physicians, physicists, engineers, evolutionary biologists, and experts from a range of medical fields. Last year, the center announced a collaboration with the global biopharma giant GSK to advance research into the lung disease pulmonary fibrosis and identify potential new treatments; it’s also firing up a new convergent project that will attempt to reverse cystic fibrosis using gene-edited stem cells.

“Fifty years ago, biomedical research typically involved a single lab pursuing experiments to test a very focused hypothesis using just a few classical lab techniques. Convergent research is very different,” says Kotton, the David C. Seldin Professor of Medicine at BU’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

He says the way CReM fosters connections across BU’s Charles River and Medical Campuses—with a unified mission to regenerate lung tissue damaged by disease—is like a lens focusing disparate rays of light onto a single point. “When normally divergent disciplines or researchers collaborate [at CReM], they are coming together or converging into solving the riddle of how to engineer lung regeneration,” says Kotton, who will be cochairing the new convergence task force with Lutchen. “When this happens, we tend to find new approaches, ideas, and hopefully solutions to a big problem. The question is how to get this convergence to happen more often and more effectively.”

Preparing Students to Become Leaders

When Gilliam was formally inaugurated as BU’s president last fall, one of the celebration events showcased some of BU’s star researchers, each giving a lightning talk about their work and impact. First on stage was Pamela Templer, a CAS Distinguished Professor and chair of biology. She discussed her research, along with a training initiative open to PhD students in biogeoscience, environmental health, statistics, and data science that equips them to take on environmental challenges.

The NSF-funded BU Graduate Program in Urban Biogeoscience & Environmental Health (BU URBAN) encourages students to converge across disciplinary boundaries, giving them a blend of technical knowledge and communication skills. Templer’s own work in environmental change, particularly forests’ carbon cycles, pulls from data sciences, urban studies, and other fields beyond her training in ecology and biology.

“I really believe it’s the collaborative nature of our environment at BU that allows us to do convergent work, whether it’s answering fundamental questions or society development questions,” said Templer at the inauguration event. “To me, what’s most exciting is we get to prepare our students for the workforce and to be leaders on their own.”

BU URBAN is just one of a number of federally funded convergent training programs that the University has hosted—with other current efforts pursuing heart attack cures and developing energy sector leaders.

That student preparation element is an important component of the convergent approach, says Lutchen. One of the new task force’s priorities is to examine how convergence might shape undergraduate and graduate education, in the classroom and the lab.

“Students coming to BU really are looking to have an impactful life,” says Lutchen, “and are recognizing that the more they can understand how to work across disciplines, [then] the more prepared they are to lead in industry, in the corporate world, at community levels, because they’re not thinking in a narrow way—they’re trained to embrace ideas from different perspectives.”

For Boas, convergence has proven an important graduate student recruitment tool. There are currently 130 graduate students affiliated with the Neurophotonics Center, bringing research interests spanning Alzheimer’s disease, computational neuroscience, biomedical engineering, traumatic brain injury, medical imaging, Parkinson’s disease, and a range of other health- and engineering-related topics. Hutyra says she has graduate students following her path in focusing on the carbon cycle, but also on optics engineering, geospatial mapping, and isotopes.

“There’s a lot more excitement when you have that convergence of fields,” says Boas. “Everyone’s learning new things. It’s a very dynamic environment to work in.”

Advancing a BU Strength

The task force’s goal is to take BU’s convergent research to the next level, replicating individual successes—like those at the Neurophotonics Center—at an institution-wide scale. Its charge includes outlining a convergent strategy for BU and taking down barriers to implementation. In addition to working with the University community to identify societal themes and emerging topics to take on, it’ll also consider how to build structures that encourage collaboration, what sort of investments will be needed to fuel new projects, and when and where to pull in outside partners.

But Lutchen emphasizes that there will always be space for disciplinary experts—those who pursue insights in a single field or area of study.

“The mission of the institution is to advance the forefronts of knowledge and to nourish and create world experts to do that, but also to engage in research that could potentially transform new innovations for society,” he says. “It’s the second part that is about embracing a culture of community, groups to work together. It’s a blended portfolio.”

Analyzing some of the barriers to success will take the committee into the weeds of academia: If a new faculty member’s work cuts across disciplines, who hires them? What happens when that faculty is up for tenure and has to prove their impact on one particular academic discipline, but bring a portfolio that crosses many?

“Most importantly, what we want to hear from the faculty is what we can do to make it easier for them to do this kind of convergent research. What are the barriers to it?” says Waters. “The highly collaborative nature of our faculty, the desire to work across disciplines, is something that is really special about BU. We think this is the future and we want to do an even better job of it.”