Good News

The teaching on interdisciplinary excellence that Gabriele Bammer provided in 2020 for faculty from a number of Egyptian universities through the private provider, Knowledge E, has resulted in:

• enthusiastic support from the ministers of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR) and Education for embedding interdisciplinary capacity throughout the education system in Egypt, including establishing a new interdisciplinary committee specifically to prioritise and advance the systemic embedding of interdisciplinary capacity in all government-funded higher education and research institutions.
• 15 planned new universities now to be founded on interdisciplinary principles.
• A new Call for Proposals for “Establishing Centres of Excellence in Urban Governance for Unplanned Areas based on Trans-/Inter-disciplinary Projects.”
• Support for further faculty development in interdisciplinarity.

Defence Science and Technology has proposed that contributions to i2Inisghts blog be a deliverable for proposals funded under a call for projects on the Philosophy of Operations Research.

Keynote and invited presentations

Gabriele Bammer gave an invited presentation on “Diversity, team work and innovative thinking” to the Autonomous Analyst and AI-enabled Wargaming research groups at Defence Science and Technology.

RSPH workshops and seminars

Gabriele Bammer organises a successful RSPH seminar on increasing writing output.

Outreach and engagement

Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane produced the March/April i2S News (https://i2s.anu.edu.au/what-i2s/i2s-publications/i2s-news), which featured the theory diffusion of innovations, updated tools on unknowns, the Journal of Awareness Based Systems Change, the research 4 impact network and multiple conferences on systems, decision-making, interdisciplinarity, impact assessment, risk analysis and transformations. These have recently been added as resources to the Integration and Implementation Sciences website (https://i2s.anu.edu.au/resources).

In March the Integration and Implementation Insights blog (http://i2Insights.org) curated by Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane again increased the number of views (26.5K) and viewers (17.3K). Blog posts covered the art of non-decision making, frameworks for assessing research impact, the Toolbox dialogue method, incommensurability and transdisciplinary research in Africa.

Education

Gabriele Bammer gave a guest lecture on “Why research on environment and development needs transdisciplinary integration” in a Crawford School Masters course 'Development and Environment in the Anthropocene.'