On June 11–12, Cornell will host a regional gathering designed to tackle a challenge facing colleges nationwide: how to build an undergraduate educational experience that crosses both disciplinary boundaries and institutional lines.
Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, the Upstate New York Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) conference will bring together 50 scholars – including faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students – from community colleges, liberal arts institutions and research universities across the state.
“The idea is to bring undergraduate institutions together to answer interdisciplinary education questions that span multiple institution types,” said Michelle Smith, senior associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Arts & Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Arts & Sciences in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Organizers say the conference responds to a longstanding problem: education research, like many academic fields, tends to be siloed by discipline and by institutional type. The result is that researchers often tackle similar questions in isolation.
“I've realized that there is so much overlap in shared questions and ideas across DBER disciplines,” said Austin Zuckerman, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in biology education (A&S) and one of the conference organizers. “Some of the most generative thinking I do comes from informal conversations with colleagues in other fields.”
Zuckerman said he wanted to create a space where those conversations could happen intentionally, rather than “as one-time interactions at larger conferences.”
That emphasis on intentional collaboration shapes the structure of the two-day program. The conference will center on interactive formats, with a poster session opening the event and much of the time devoted to working groups focused on two themes: interdisciplinary research and multi-institution collaboration.
“We’re doing very interactive working-group style sessions,” said organizer Maggie Webb, a postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering education. “The goal is to set the seeds for future collaboration and explore what the barriers are, as well as what could enable more work across institutions.”
Participants will document discussions, with plans to synthesize outcomes into a report or white paper. Organizers hope those efforts could serve as a model for future state-level collaboration.
The regional focus is intentional. Upstate New York, organizers say, offers a dense network of higher education institutions with varied missions, making it an ideal testing ground for cross-sector collaboration.
“Upstate New York has a long history of leadership in STEM, higher education and educational innovation,” said Alexandra Werth, a Cornell assistant professor of biomedical engineering in Cornell Duffield Engineering whose research focuses on engineering education. “Many of us are working on similar questions from different disciplinary and institutional perspectives, but we do not always have enough opportunities to learn from each other.”
Werth noted that collaboration across institutions could help researchers compare approaches, develop better tools for assessing student learning and understand how educational strategies perform in different settings.
For participants from smaller institutions, the conference offers access to a broader research community.
Organizers emphasize that interdisciplinary education is increasingly necessary as students prepare for complex careers. Zuckerman’s own research, for example, examines how biology students connect classroom learning with workforce skills.
“You can't really understand workforce preparation by staying within one discipline,” he said.
Cara Robertus, a postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering education and another event organizer, said the conference aims to turn shared questions into sustained partnerships. “Our primary goal is to create a space for researchers across disciplines and institutions in upstate New York to connect, build community, and explore avenues to interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaborations,” she said.
Potential outcomes could extend beyond research to shared seminars, collaborative curriculum development and ongoing networks for feedback and support.
For Webb, the success of the event will ultimately be measured by what happens after it ends. Many attendees, she noted, have never met despite working in related areas.
“If people leave having had conversations they couldn’t have had at their home institution,” Zuckerman added, “and they leave with a person or two they want to keep talking to, the conference has already done something impactful.”
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