Interdisciplinary Showcase
The workforce and complex issues of today call for knowledge and competencies across fields. The College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS) offers a distinct interdisciplinary curriculum, focusing on integrating knowledge across science, the arts and humanities. Here, we showcase some examples of interdisciplinarity in action in research, as well as the work of our students and alumni.
Our Research
Using nature to fight climate change
How can conservation science deliver insights that create real-world impact? Amid mounting pressure on natural ecosystems, the diverse team of experts at NUS’ Centre for Nature-based Climate Solutions has long understood that effectively safeguarding and restoring precious habitats demands a multidisciplinary approach that takes the socioeconomic, cultural, political and environmental intricacies of climate and conservation policies into account.
One of the Centre’s main projects in 2021 involved researching how protecting carbon-rich mangrove forests fringing coasts around the globe could support climate change mitigation while providing multiple co-benefits. Beyond complex spatial analysis, mapping economically viable conservation projects required a closer look at today’s carbon markets and local conditions to determine where and to what extent carbon credits could help finance mangrove conservation efforts.
The Centre was launched in 2020, and serves as a focal point for research, thought leadership and education on nature-based climate solutions in the Asia Pacific region.
Nature, a balm for mental wellbeing
Sustainable governance of transboundary environmental commons
A multidisciplinary team led by Prof David Taylor, NUS Asia Research Institute and Department of Geography, FASS, worked with stakeholders to identify causes and effects of biomass burning and hydropower development, and best practices in environmental governance, as well as to develop the concept of transboundary environmental commons in ASEAN.
The team of environmentalists, political scientists and ecologists is building a foundation for sustainable governance of common resources such as fisheries, forests and irrigation systems in ASEAN. This will lay the groundwork for future policy work in Singapore and Southeast Asia, so as to boost social development and environmental protection, thereby mitigating the impacts of global heating.
Prof Taylor says, “Collaborative research brings with it unique opportunities and enhanced levels of resilience. Along with the excellence of the researchers involved, this has enabled us to more than meet project targets. Not only have we incorporated effects of system-wide shocks, like pandemics, into our thinking, we are also developing a proposal targeting long-term governance of carbon-accumulating ecosystems.”
Helping poor families in Singapore alleviate hardship
Many countries, including Singapore, suffer from a wide wealth gap among their citizens. This is evident by the high Gini coefficient, a gauge of economic inequality.
Assoc Prof Esther Goh, Department of Social Work, FASS, is leading an interdisciplinary research team on the first longitudinal study on how low-income families in Singapore adapt to extreme financial constraints. The findings will help fill the void in the understanding of family resilience and contribute to more targeted social policies.
Assoc Prof Goh says, “The diverse disciplinary knowledge and methodological expertise of our team enriched the project. The paediatrician and paediatric dentist analysed complex relationships between economic hardship on the health outcomes of children from poor homes. The developmental, clinical and educational psychologists, together with social work researchers, provided indepth analysis on the dynamics in poor families and parent-child relationships. In short, the productivity of this project could largely be attributed to the interdisciplinary team.”
Helping poor families in Singapore alleviate hardship
From molecules to the planet: Integrated technologies for biodiversity conservation
Natural ecosystems are experiencing an unprecedented biodiversity crisis. Land use pressures for urbanisation and agriculture and anthropogenic climate change have driven the decline and loss of many species and will change the abiotic and biotic landscape for years to come.
However, our understanding of biodiversity responses to such ongoing threats is hampered by the lack of on-the-ground biodiversity surveys that are hard to scale up across landscapes. For highly diverse groups such as insects and plants, there is the additional need for taxonomic experts.
Using a terrestrial laser scanner to locate, calibrate and validate 3D canopy structure measurements obtained by one of NASA’s satellites called GEDI
Earth-scale observation and high-throughput DNA sequencing are rapidly emerging technologies with the potential to address these urgent gaps in biodiversity monitoring at large spatial and temporal scales. DNA sequences obtained from bulk samples can be used to rapidly characterise communities and quantify change on the ground, while remote sensing technology (either from air or space) can evaluate vegetation structure and complexity at the global scale. By combining the two, we hope to be able to scale up our assessments of biodiversity change to meet global conservation needs.
Our Alumni
Transforming waste into valuable biomaterials
The growing amount of food waste leads to economic and ecological problems. Insectta, co-founded by Phua Junwei, (Life Sciences, FOS, 2017) and Chua Kai-Ning (English Linguistics, FASS, 2018), developed a food waste valorisation technology which harnesses the humble black soldier fly to convert food waste into high-value biomaterials for industries.
Kai-Ning (centre) has always championed ecological causes that make economic sense. Junwei (right) read entomology in NUS, which fuelled his interest in the biological ability of insects to solve society’s problems. Insectta was born out of the integration of knowledge from their seemingly diverse disciplines.
The start-up is the first in the world to develop processes for extracting melanin, chitosan and probiotics from the black soldier fly. Its melanin technology is being studied for potential applications in biobatteries, bioimaging and cancer treatment, and its chitosan for cosmetics, wound-healing and anti-microbial applications.
They say, “The advancement of deep technology depends equally on the arts and sciences. Scientific experts develop the technology, while humanities practitioners understand economic and social factors driving deep technology.”
