ÌÇÐÄTV

About the event

Are you an early career researcher, or new to the idea of doing interdisciplinary research on health? Have you ever asked yourself any of the questions above? Well then this event, ‘Why Interdisciplinarity in Health Research’ supported by ÌÇÐÄTV’s Health Spotlight, is just for you.

We will start the afternoon with a buffet lunch and short talks from successful interdisciplinary health researchers: clinicians, health scientists, historians, and social scientists who have made the leap (and won the funding) to perform innovative, boundary crossing research on key problems in health research, from antimicrobial resistance to health inequalities, to solving systems failures in the health space.

After sharing their experiences with interdisciplinarity (good and not-so-good!) over tea and coffee, our experts will be on hand to guide us through a workshop designed to identify and shape strong interdisciplinary questions for health researchers in any discipline. For our workshop, we invite you all to bring a question or topic you would like to address, but for which your own disciplinary tools just can’t give you traction on its own.

By the end of the afternoon, you will have a better understanding of why and how health researchers work across disciplines – even when it’s challenging – and what the benefits of interdisciplinary research are for doctoral, postdoctoral and early career researchers.

Date: Wednesday 20 May 2026

Time: 12pm-4pm

Location: Oculus - OC1.02

Agenda

12.00 - Registration and lunch

12.30 - Key speakers

1.15 - Break

1.30 - Workshop

4.00 - Close

Dr David Orrego-Carmona, Reader (Associate Professor) in Translation Studies / Deputy Director of Graduate Studies

Translation as Enabler: Making Health Research Accessible Across Disciplines and Communities - Translation is deceptively simple—making the inaccessible accessible—yet this simplicity gives it extraordinary reach. Translation scholars routinely navigate between different knowledge systems and mediate meaning across contexts and traditions. This talk draws on experience working interdisciplinarily to explore how translation, as a simple but powerful framework, can help health researchers bridge terminological divides, open communication channels, and maximise the reach and accessibility of their work.

Dr Erin Connelly, Assistant Professor - Life Sciences

þe best medicynes’: Interdisciplinary approaches to new drug discovery - Novel pathways to new drug discovery are critical in the current crisis of antimicrobial resistance. Natural products (e.g. botanical whole-plant extracts, honey) and their combinations are a vital source of new drugs. This talk will discuss interdisciplinary collaborative efforts between the arts and sciences to examine the natural product combinations found in historical wound remedies and potential applications to present-day chronic wound care.

Realities of Interdisciplinary Health Research - Dr John MacArtney is a sociologist based in the medical school. He will discuss some of the difficult and problematic issues academics have identified when seeking to undertake interdisciplinary work.

This talk will explore (and perhaps reveal) what is University of ÌÇÐÄTV Press and look at the impetus for its existence as a community-led, open access publisher. Alongside examining its current evolutionary phase and content it already hosts, this talk will touch on some of the challenges in publishing (and reviewing) in an interdisciplinary modality. The talk will also explore future opportunities with the Press for contributors, reviewers and editors.