With ongoing funding from Chancellor Michael Lovell, and an initial two-year contribution from the Graduate School, the Center for 21st Century Studies’ Transdisciplinary Challenge Award encourages collaborative research projects that bring together UWM researchers from our traditional constituencies in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences with researchers from natural, physical, and quantitative social sciences.

This initiative is designed to prompt researchers from any disciplinary background to think in unexpected and untried ways about working with researchers in disciplines whose methodology, content, and institutional practices are unfamiliar to them. Although this is not the kind of research with which most academics have experience, we are convinced that this kind of research will become increasingly prevalent and necessary in the 21st century. The aim of this award is not only to generate new research approaches to the complex problems of the 21st century but also to provide models for how researchers from disciplines that do not have a history of collaboration can work together to meet the complex, heterogeneous challenges of the 21st century.

Please consult this Request for Proposals (RFP) for details. Key milestones to be aware of:

Informational meetings:
Thursday, October 25 and Monday, October 29, 2012
Curtin 939, 3:30 pm
Initial Statement of Interest: Friday, November 9, 2012
Pre-Proposal: Monday, December 10, 2012
Proposal: Friday, February 15, 2013

Previous awardees are listed below:

2012

21st Century Voices: Synthesized Speech in the Third Millennium

Yi Hu (Electrical Engineering and Computer Design)

Shelley Lund (Communication Sciences and Disorders)

Patricia Mayes (English)

Heather Warren-Crow (Art and Design)

$200,000 in total funding, over two years

“When ‘Speech’ Is Not a ‘Voice,’” UWM feature story

2012

Intention and Attention: Transmodernism and Integration in Human Movement Studies

Wendy Huddleston (Kinesiology)

Luc Vanier (Dance)

$50,000 in total funding, over two years, to further develop the proposal, find additional scholars to contribute to the project (especially in neuroscience), and to begin pursuing the research

"Exploring Movement and the Mind," UWM feature story

2011

Escaping Flatland: (Re-)Writing the Histories, Geographies, and Borderland Ecologies of Water

Manu Sobti (Architecture and Urban Planning)

Timothy J. Ehlinger (Biological Sciences)

Ryan B. Holifield (Geography)

$300,000 in total funding, over two years

"A Model for Managing Resources across Borders," UWM feature story