Dr. Mary Santelmann has been on the faculty of OSU's Department of Geosciences since 1992. She has a synergistic approach to her work, organizing conferences and developing research projects that bring together experts from across the scientific spectrum and from around the country. In January, Santelmann accepted the director's position for the University's new Water Resources Program, an interdisciplinary program offering five degrees in three areas of specialization (profiled in last fall's issue of Open Minds). We're pleased to introduce Dr. Santelmann and share some of her experiences in designing and managing large interdisciplinary research projects.
OM: The Water Resources Program bridges six colleges and a dozen different departments. What's your experience in working across disciplines?
MS: I am an interdisciplinary person from as far back as my start in college. I've always had interests in both science and the humanities, and in both the biological sciences and the physical sciences. So while I chose for my professional career to go into the biological sciences, and particularly ecosystems ecology, I never lost interest in the way that humans and the environment interact. We live in a world where people are interacting with the environment and the environment is influencing us all the time. The things I care about, like clean water and providing beautiful places for all the beings on this planet to share, depend on human/environment interaction. I'm not as interested in looking at any one component in isolation as I am in putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.
OM: Interdisciplinary studies seem to be getting a lot of attention these days. Is it getting easier to get grant funds for interdisciplinary programs?
MS: Not really. It's actually quite difficult, because so many people need a piece of the pie that your project tends to be very large. So you're always going for big grants that are hugely competitive, for example, STAR grants from the US Environmental Protection Agency or awards from the Biocomplexity in the Environment Program at the National Science Foundation. We're just recovering from finding out that for the second year in a row, we didn't get funded for a $2 million project we submitted to the Biocomplexity in the Environment program. It was a great proposal, and we got very close, but in the end they didn't choose us. Now that program is gone and we're trying a whole different approach, breaking out the components for smaller grants.
We did get a Biocomplexity grant in 2001/02, and we're hoping to build on that. It was a smaller grant, but we held a conference and workshop, produced a special section in the journal Wetlands, and supported two students for a master's thesis and a PhD thesis, so NSF got a lot of return on its investment. Those papers just came out last month, and we're going to use our success with that grant to leverage related pieces. So rather than trying to get $1 or $2 million once, we'll try to get a few hundred thousand each for several collaborative proposals. Getting the first one should make it easier to get the others.
Putting together a proposal where you have five institutions involved means you have to get five budgets written and get each one through its institution before you can put together the budget for the project as a whole. Just being able to do that ought to show you deserve to get the money! And that's not to mention the coordination within each institution. On our last project, we involved four OSU departments in four colleges, so we had to get signatures from four different deans. It's a monumental task.
OM: Have you had good support for your projects here at OSU?
MS: Yes, and I feel very lucky to be at a university that really supports the interdisciplinary model. At one of the STAR grant meetings, we were talking about our institutional experiences and about the barriers to working across disciplines. Some people were saying their departments and their colleges strongly disapprove of interdisciplinary projects. And I had to say that my perception was that Oregon State is just the opposite. You're always encouraged to work across boundaries, to compete for those exciting, ambitious interdisciplinary research grants. There are two people in the water resources community here who did receive those Biocomplexity grants my group missed out on. That's impressive when you consider they gave out maybe five or six of those larger awards across the U.S. each year the program was in place.
OM: You helped advise the EPA STAR grant program on successful approaches to managing interdisciplinary grants. Are you considered an expert in this realm?
MS: I get the sense that the body of people who've done this kind of thing successfully is really very small. In fact a colleague on one of my projects told me he'd been on several supposedly interdisciplinary projects, and this was the only one that was truly interdisciplinary. That's because from the start, we set out to help people see the world through interdisciplinary eyes. It's the hardest thing to achieve, but it's also the most important.
I was principal investigator on a $1.2 million STAR grant a few years ago. Before we got started, we did a weeklong workshop where we put teams together from multiple disciplines, and went out and looked at the landscape we were going to be modeling. Each person talked about the landscape from his or her own perspective, and that really helped us start understanding how to see through the eyes of people in different disciplines.
On that project, I actually started carrying a dictionary around with me because my social science colleagues were using words I'd never heard of as an ecologist. Like the word "normative," which describes what we think should happen. In ecology, nobody ever talks about what should happen, because that would be a value judgment, and we're trained that as scientists that we shouldn't make those.
And having different vocabularies is a simple issue compared to the differences in how we approach a problem. It's not unusual for the people in one discipline to have some anxiety about whether the people in the other disciplines are doing what they should be doing. On that STAR grant, for example, the people doing the water quality monitoring and the hydrologic modeling were looking at the methods being used by the social science team -- farmer interviews and things like that -- and it was simply not quantitative enough for them. And yet those are standard methods in that field. Meanwhile, you've got the people in the social sciences looking at the others saying, "They're so detail-oriented! They want to calibrate everything. Why can't they let go and think big?" So part of my job is to reassure everyone that their colleagues are doing what they're supposed to be doing, and of course, ensure that they are!
One of the toughest pieces to get coordinated between people in different disciplines is the concept of scale. For any aspect of the project, there's a whole array of models you can use, and you have to choose a model that matches the scale and precision of other components of the study. At the EPA meeting on conducting interdisciplinary research, I heard about a project in California with one team doing a hydrologic model of river flow, and a team of biologists modeling fish populations. The principal investigator, a political scientist, didn't understand either of the modeling approaches that were being used by the other teams - and apparently they had never talked about the scale issues -- and so the output from the hydrologic models was nothing like what the fish modelers needed as input. And they didn't know this until they got pretty far into the project.
Just because people agree to collaborate doesn't mean they're ready to collaborate. It's not an easy thing to do. And when you put things together that haven't been put together before, you have to be able to think more broadly than you do within your own discipline. Some people treat interdisciplinary projects as more of a relay than a team effort. At times that works, but it often poses problems.
OM: What kind of research interests are you pursuing right now?
MS: What I've been doing in recent years is looking at the role wetlands play in ecosystems. That might be anything from the aesthetic value of wetlands in a landscape to the moderation of flow regimes. Right now I'm working with a colleague in Portland on some proposals to look at the role of urban wetlands in nutrient uptake.
OM: What brought you to the job directing the Water Resources Program?
MS: At the time the position was first being discussed, I was helping with the Initiative for Water and Watersheds, to coordinate water-related opportunities for research, education and outreach across OSU. I was encouraged to apply by some of the faculty on that committee, who knew I enjoyed managing complex projects and working with graduate students.
It's a quarter-time position, although so far I've been working almost full time getting things up to speed. Still, once we get our systems in place, I expect to be able to get back to my research. It will be a nice balance, really, because it will allow me to meet a lot of the amazing graduate students who come through the Water Resources Program, and maybe share some opportunities for them to work as research assistants. I like working with graduate students, making things come together for them.
OM: What are some of the first things you'll do in this new position?
MS: The program has only been in existence since October, so there's still a lot of mundane procedural design we need to do to make life as easy as possible for our graduate students and faculty. We're also talking about diversity issues, and how to partner with institutions that will help us draw a broader selection of students from underrepresented groups. As a woman in the sciences, I'm especially sensitive to that.
One of the first events we're planning is a celebration to acknowledge what we have in this program and what we've already achieved. It will probably be an open house, honoring the people who put together both the Water Resources Program and the Initiative for Water and Watersheds. We'll have a poster session there, to show what kind of exciting research is already going on in the water resources arena here at OSU.
In terms of a more long-range vision, I'd say my priority is on building the community. We already have a wonderful cooperative base, people who've been working creatively together for years. I see my role as cementing that base, expanding it and bringing in top graduate students from across the country. We have to spread the word that this is one of the best places in the U.S. to come if you want to study water and water resource issues.
