EDITOR'S LETTER

If one queried the 3,000-plus scientists and scholars comprising the University of Maryland's faculty and asked the question, "What one characteristic distinguishes Maryland from other research universities?" it's a near-certainty that one of the leading responses, if not the top response, would be interdisciplinary scholarship.

That very point is made in so many conversations I have had with faculty from across the campus that about a year ago I decided that "interdisciplinary research" was not just an idea, but some kind of movement swelling within the faculty's ranks. Turns out I was right.

At Maryland, crossing disciplinary boundaries is more than just happenstance. It is a clear priority of the university's leaders, from the office of the president, to the deans and department heads, to senior faculty working in fields as diverse as they are numerous. The fruits of this commitment are evident in many ways--through the proliferation of interdisciplinary research groups at Maryland, to the remarkable rise in sponsored research funding going to our faculty, to the spirit of entrepreneurship that permeates many of our schools and colleges.

In this issue of Maryland Research, we introduce you to three interdisciplinary efforts at the university addressing some of the leading questions of our time, beginning with the phenomenal merger between the biological sciences and the computer sciences. Computational biology has all but revolutionized our ability to understand the complexity of human physiology, right down to the very chemical structures that make up our genetic code.

We also bring you stories about a project to refine Internet technology so that online transactions can mirror real-time decisions by business people and consumers, as well as ongoing research into the acquisition of language by children. While not a new academic debate, Maryland researchers using interdisciplinary approaches are beginning to hone in on some firm answers about how youngsters derive meaning from words.

While these three efforts represent a strong core of interdisciplinary work at Maryland, they are by no means the whole story. In virtually every corner of the campus, long-standing walls between academic disciplines are coming down to make room for new collaborative research efforts. Like the federal government, Maryland is quickly developing its own alphabet soup of specialized research groups that are organized around broad, complex problems rather than narrowly focused research questions. You will find the work of these research groups time and time again in the pages of this magazine, for they are the vanguards of a new paradigm in research--one where discovery itself is bigger than the sum of its academic parts.
--Daniel Cusick, editor