Interdisciplinarity indicator

Some 20 years after the pressure for the creation of the new interdisciplinary laboratories was first felt, one of the academics who became involved very early on. Prof. Rustum Roy of Pennsylvania State University, wrote eloquently about the underlying ideal of interdisciplinarity (Roy 1977). He also emphasised the supportive role played by some influential industrial scientists in that creation, notably Dr. Guy Suits of GE, whom we have already encountered, and Dr. William Baker of Bell Laboratories who was a major force in pushing for interdisciplinary materials research in industry and academe alike. A magisterial survey by Baker (1967), under the title Solid State Science and Materials Development, indicates the breadth and scope of his scientific interests. 

The group of Zucker and Darby [141 -143] found a positive impact of research universities on nearby firms related to a positive impact on the firms research productivity, increasing the number of biotechnology patents, more products in development, and more products on the market, as of 1989-1990. Arts and Veugelers [144] and Arts et al. [145] discussed indicators derived from patent documents to capture the nature and impact of technological inventions, and to compare and validate these indicators within the field of biotechnology. However, the studies suffer from a lack of interdisciplinarity, which may be considered necessary for such work. 

Nanofunctional materials in general, and nanoparticles in particular, are the basic constituents of the nanosciences, a field characterized by an unprecedented interdisciplinarity that merges chemistry with engineering, physics with material sciences and medicine. The importance of this topic is definitely substantial, as testified by the astonishing and increasing number of related publications. This lively research indicates not only that a certain degree of maturity in the know-how has been reached, but also that the development of nanotechnological products, even if more and more extensive, is only in its infancy. 

In this paper we have been able to address the central themes of titis conference, social relevance and interdisciplinarity in engineering education. Our first hypothesis - that exposure to the societal implications of engineering is more appealing to women - is confirmed by our results. If we consider only student perceptions, as we do in this paper, there is not support for the second hypothesis - that increased integration of humanities and social science subjects will make the curriculum more socially relevant. Rather, the students perceptions of interdisciplinarity remained very STEM focused despite the fact that our on-going research indicates that administrators in engineering share overall a vision of interdisciplinarity which extends to the humanities and social sciences. 

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