Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Science is increasingly a collaborative pursuit. Although the modern scientific enterprise owes much to individuals working at the core of their field, humanity is increasingly confronted by highly complex problems that require the integration of a variety of disciplinary and methodological expertise. In 2016, the U.S. National Science Foundation launched an initiative prioritizing support for convergence research as a means of “solving vexing research problems, in particular, complex problems focusing on societal needs.” We discuss our understanding of the objectives of convergence research and describe in detail the conditions and processes likely to generate successful convergence research. We use our recent experience as participants in a convergence workshop series focused on resilience in the Arctic to highlight key points. The emergence of resilience science over the past 50 years is presented as a successful contemporary example of the emergence of convergence. We close by describing some of the challenges to the development of convergence research, such as timescales and discounting the future, appropriate metrics of success, allocation issues, and funding agency requirements.
Department
Soil Biogeochemistry and Microbial Ecology; Natural Resources and the Environment
Publication Date
7-27-2023
Journal Title
Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene
Publisher
University of California Press
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Shana M. Sundstrom, David G. Angeler, Jessica G. Ernakovich, Jorge H. García, Joseph A. Hamm, Orville Huntington, Craig R. Allen; The emergence of convergence. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 5 January 2023; 11 (1): 00128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2022.00128
Rights
© 2023 The Author(s)
Comments
This is an Open Access article published by University of California Press in Elementa in 2023, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2022.00128