Looking Outwards from the “Central Science”: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Graduate Education in Materials Chemistry

Abstract

The centrality of chemical sciences has long been underpinned by the infusion of ideas from other disciplines. These ideas have contributed in large measure to advancing, accelerating, and expanding the scope of discovery. Recent advances in data analytics can potentially transform the discipline of chemistry and its practice. However, taking advantage of the “Big Data” paradigm requires a distinctive set of skills that are not thus far in the usual repertoire of chemistry or materials science graduate students who typically receive little formal training in handling large data sets. In this Chapter, we outline a recently initiated interdisciplinary graduate program focused on “Data-Enabled Discovery and Design of Energy Materials (D3EM)” that seeks to explore a novel model for interdisciplinary graduate education with a materials chemistry and materials science core at Texas A&M University. D3EM’s overarching goal is to develop and institutionalize a new training model that produces scientists/engineers grounded in one discipline but who have the professional and technical skills to collaborate and lead interdisciplinary teams, throughout their academic careers and beyond. The contribution seeks to outline our motivations for designing an interdisciplinary program, describes the structure of the program, and provides specific case studies of research projects that have benefited from an interdisciplinary perspective. Some salient aspects of the program include: 1) learning outcomes aligned with critical skills identified by potential employers; 2) a comprehensive e-portfolio to enable students to internalize interdisciplinarity; 3) a capstone Materials Discovery and Design Studio to promote interdisciplinary approaches to the solution of complex materials development problems; 4) the creation of a faculty community of scholars to facilitate the internalization of interdisciplinarity within faculty participants; and 5) a first-year graduate training sequence featuring strong disciplinary grounding followed by an interdisciplinary immersion––to ensure that the student have a sufficient disciplinary foundation.

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