Achievement

We have developed an innovative year-long foundation course that combines multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. The team-led course is modular in nature and designed to foster exploration of the historical, conceptual and applied linkages among the disparate disciplines that represent evolutionary primatology. Each module emphasizes the linkages (as well as the contradictions) inherent in such interdisciplinary research. For example, the module on systematics presents the fundamentals of taxonomy and phylogenetics, using data from morphology, genomics and behavior, and then applies these concepts to broader questions about zoogeography, conservation and global extinctions. Rather than assuming that students discover an interdisciplinary research agenda on their own, solely through exposure to ongoing multidisciplinary research around them, the course provides an explicitly interdisciplinary way of thinking from the outset.