Introducing East Meets West

“Working together, we can move forward,” says Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs Robert Barish, with Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan Poser.

Two new leaders have joined UIC since the beginning of the year, and they’ve quickly formed a team approach to guiding the vision of the east and west sides of campus.

Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs Robert Barish and Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan Poser hope students, staff and faculty will follow their lead and form collaborations across campus to further the UIC’s academic, research and urban missions.

“A lot of people don’t know about the collaborations between the east and west parts of the university, so we want to highlight these collaborations and let the campus know that we’re working together to move the institution forward,” Barish said.

In order to highlight multidisciplinary, cross-campus collaborations, Poser and Barish came up with the idea for East Meets West, a new feature in UIC News.

“We were talking about the importance of not only increasing collaborations among all colleges and departments but also celebrating them and making them known,” Poser said. “We agreed that one way to build these collaborations is to let people know it’s already going on and how relatively easy it is to start one.”

Researchers can connect with each other by attending faculty research presentations and colloquia, browsing faculty websites and reading about faculty research in the news, among other opportunities, Poser said.

Students can also get involved in campus collaborations through talking to their professors and finding opportunities on the Undergraduate Research Experience.

Multidisciplinary projects are attractive to funding agencies, Barish said.

“Federal funding agencies are looking for collaborations — they’re looking for more of a team approach,” he said. “It helps the university to take a multidisciplinary, inter-professional approach. Working together, we can move forward.”

Most research questions benefit from multidisciplinary answers, Poser said.

“The problems don’t come in silos and we should not be thinking we can solve them in silos,” she said. “We have such a wide range of expertise at this university to apply to researching and solving these problems.”

Poser and Barish are working together to oversee academic affairs on campus, with Barish overseeing the health sciences and Poser overseeing the physical sciences, engineering, the humanities, social sciences and the arts.

“We’ve struck up a very good friendship, a good working relationship,” Poser said. “We are talking practically on a daily basis about what’s happening on campus and we are focused on bringing the campus together. It’s a team effort.”

It’s important to promote the good work happening on campus, Barish said.

“Sometimes we need to brag about ourselves,” he said. “We suspect that in many instances neither the campus nor the external community knows about these collaborations.  We need to get the word out about the incredible things happening on the entire campus.”

Read the first story in the series:

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