The Leading Edge
Within our research university, there are many Arts & Sciences departments and disciplines that stand poised to bound forward in their scholarship and academic distinction. Transformative innovations in knowledge and discovery come when scholars innovate at the leading edge of their disciplines and create novel synergies across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Some questions press us further down paths within our disciplines into places never yet explored; other questions open out into paths never before taken and make connections with adjacent fields.
Arts & Sciences at Washington University has a long and stellar history of producing transformational advances through both avenues — pushing further and pulling together — including leading missions to Mars, unpacking the workings of the Supreme Court, elucidating how human memory shapes a host of phenomena, and many more. Putting energy and investment into those places and people where our research is already pushing against boundaries within (e.g., Urban Sociology, Political Science) and among (e.g., Digital Transformation Initiative, Diversity Science) disciplines will raise the academic distinction of Arts & Sciences while advancing new knowledge, enabling new findings, creating new discoveries, training the scholars of tomorrow through novel graduate education, and producing new solutions to the biggest questions and most intractable challenges that drive our work.
