Prominent but Less Productive: The Impact of Interdisciplinarity on Scientists' Research Erin Leahey Erin Leahey is professor and director of sociology at the University of Arizona. Her main research interests are scientific practice, scientific careers, and innovation. Recently, she has conducted investigations of knowledge that spans domains – both subfields and fields. With Sharon Koppman (UC Irvine), she has traced the diffusion of three unconventional techniques that were imported into sociology from other fields. With Jim Moody she has found that subfield-spanning research is more highly cited (Social Currents 2014). With Christine Beckman, she finds that field-spanning, interdisciplinary research fares similarly, but there’s a trade-off: engagement with interdisciplinary research also depresses scholarly productivity. In a current NSF-funded project, Leahey is developing measures of universities’ commitment to interdisciplinarity, and assessing both the drivers of commitment levels, and the consequences of them for scientific research output and university prestige. With Attila Varga and Jerry Jacobs, she is examining whether and how large, secondary datasets serve as hubs that help scholars from multiple disciplines coalesce. Fostering Major Organizational Change in Higher Education Institutions Ann Austin Ann E. Austin is a Professor at Michigan State University, who held the inaugural Mildred B. Erickson Distinguished Chair in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) from 2005 to 2008. Her scholarly interests focus on faculty careers, roles, and professional development, work and workplaces in academe, organizational change and transformation in universities and colleges, reform in doctoral education, and the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education. She was a Fulbright Fellow in South Africa (1998) and the 2001-2002 President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). She is currently Co-P.I. of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), a National Science Foundation Center now in its sixth year. She also is the director of the Global Institute for Higher Education (GIHE), a new institute at Michigan State focused on higher education issues in a global context. Her recent publications include Rethinking Faculty Work: Higher Education's Strategic Imperative (2007), concerning changes in academic workplaces and faculty careers, as well as work on doctoral education and higher education issues in developing countries.
