Igniting Interdisciplinary Innovation: Campus-wide initiative brings hundreds of researchers together to tackle society’s most complex challenges

By Natasha Kassulke, natasha.kassulke@wisc.edu

Led by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research with support from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the Igniting Interdisciplinary Innovation (I³) initiative was launched in November 2025 to bring together researchers from across disciplines to develop transformative research ideas aligned with, or complementary to, UW–Madison’s RISE initiatives in Artificial Intelligence, Earth and Health. The program was also designed to position teams to compete for future large-scale external funding opportunities.

“The enthusiasm and participation we saw throughout the I³ process demonstrate the extraordinary breadth of expertise across UW–Madison and the tremendous potential that emerges when researchers work across traditional disciplinary boundaries,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota Brzezinska. “These projects represent innovative approaches to complex societal challenges and exemplify the collaborative spirit that drives discovery and impact at UW–Madison.”

I³ drew hundreds of researchers representing nearly every corner of campus who formed interdisciplinary teams through a series of incubation sessions, leading to proposal development and a campus-wide showcase and pitch event in May. Ultimately, 17 teams were selected to receive up to $250,000 in one-year seed awards, along with team-development support.

“By bringing together experts from multiple fields, the initiative aims to create research partnerships that transcend organizational boundaries and leverage the university’s strengths to address challenges that no single discipline can solve alone,” says Cynthia Czajkowski, senior associate vice chancellor for research.

I³ by the numbers

The scale of participation underscores both the appetite for interdisciplinary collaboration and the depth of expertise available across UW–Madison:

• Five incubation sessions
• Approximately 292 unique participants
• Nearly 100 departments represented
• Participation from 15 schools, colleges and campus units
• Fifty-two applicants and principal investigators
• Forty-one departments represented in submitted proposals
• Twenty-five finalist teams participating in the pitch event
• Ninety-one attendees at the showcase and pitch event
• Seventeen funded projects selected for awards

While the topics vary significantly, all share a common foundation: the belief that today’s most significant challenges require expertise that crosses traditional academic boundaries.

A complete list of funded I³ projects and project descriptions.

Supporting caregivers while training the next generation of health professionals

“Building the Badger Caregiving Clinic (BCC): An Innovation in Care Science, Practice, and Student Training” project will establish a dedicated support and training space for caregivers within a community-based primary care setting.

The faculty-supervised, student-led BCC project embedded within a UW Health primary care setting will provide caregiver assessments, education, resource navigation, and connections to community services. At the same time, students from occupational therapy, nursing, physical therapy, rehabilitation counseling and nutritional sciences will gain hands-on experience delivering caregiver-centered care.

“The BCC addresses one of the most pressing challenges of an aging society: the growing number of family and friend caregivers who provide essential care with little training or support,” said Beth Fields, associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology. “By identifying caregivers in primary care settings and connecting them to education, resources and community services, the project helps prevent caregiver burnout, improves well-being and supports aging in place.”

The project aligns with UW–Madison’s THRIVE priorities by addressing caregiver well-being, strengthening community-based care and helping prepare a workforce equipped to meet the needs of Wisconsin’s aging population. Future plans include developing AI-enabled simulation tools that can help train future health professionals in caregiver support skills.

Fields says her favorite part of the process has been working with colleagues and students to bring the BCC to life.

Understanding PFAS exposure and human health

“Establishing UW–Madison as a leader on human exposure to PFAS,” takes aim at a critical environmental and public health challenge facing communities across Wisconsin. Led by Christy Remucal, director of the Aquatic Sciences Center and professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the team will investigate the relationship between PFAS contamination in private groundwater wells and PFAS levels measured in residents of a highly impacted rural community.

PFAS, often called “forever chemicals,” have been used in industrial and consumer products for decades and have been associated with a range of health concerns. Despite growing public concern, major gaps remain in understanding human exposure and health impacts.

“Over the long term, our team seeks to address key gaps in our understanding of how PFAS impact health,” Remucal says. “This project will investigate linkages between PFAS contamination, human exposure and ultimately human health.”

The interdisciplinary team combines expertise in environmental chemistry, epidemiology, human health and risk communication, reflecting the collaborative approach needed to address a challenge that spans both environmental and public health domains. The project is directly related to RISE-EARTH and RISE THRIVE themes.

“Building a new interdisciplinary team was my favorite part of the process,” says Remucal. “While some of our five-member team have worked together before, this is the first time the full group has collaborated. The structure of the I³ competition required us to build a new interdisciplinary team, which will make our research stronger and will help us pursue future opportunities.”

Rethinking critical minerals and sustainability

A third project, “Launching a visionary Critical Minerals Working Group at UW-Madison,” seeks to transform how society thinks about critical mineral supply chains. Led by Julie Michelle Klinger, visiting associate professor in the IES Institute of Environmental Studies within the Department of Instruction, and colleagues in the Critical Minerals & Materials Working Group, the Madison Framework on Critical Minerals Security and Sustainability aims to develop new approaches to securing critical minerals while advancing environmental remediation and restoration.

Rather than framing critical minerals as a choice between environmental protection and economic necessity, the team argues the two objectives can be addressed together through innovative recovery strategies focused on contaminated sites, waste streams and circular resource systems.

“The reality is that we have immense quantities of critical minerals sitting in places that are too often ignored, including contaminated soils, wastewater and legacy mining sites,” says Klinger. “The question becomes: what if cleaning up those hazards is also how we source what we need?”

The project brings together expertise from engineering, geospatial science, data science, agroecology, social science and policy to develop a new framework for addressing environmental sustainability and resource security simultaneously.

“As a RISE-EARTH hire, I’m loving the process of nerding out with colleagues in very different disciplines as I continue to learn about the full breadth of relevant work unfolding across campus,” says Klinger.

The project provides a realization that we’re not trapped between environmental destruction and supply chain vulnerability.

Each aspect of the project addresses a societal problem: water contamination, degraded soils, supply chain insecurity, and the governance gaps that let environmental harms accumulate unchecked. The dual-benefit logic is what makes the team’s approach different from business as usual. The CMWG hits all three RISE themes in a deep way.

“You could say they are the load-bearing pillars of the project,” says Klinger. “What I³ provides is the catalyst and the legitimacy to convene people across STEM, social sciences, and policy in an unapologetically bold enterprise.”

Building the future of cell therapy manufacturing

Right now, making a single dose of CAR T-cell therapy is more like brewing a small batch of beer than running a factory line. Every batch is different, and cells often break down before the process finishes. A single dose of CAR T-cell therapy, also, can cost more than $400,000, and much of that cost comes from waste: cells that die or stop working during manufacturing.

The project, “Intelligent Biomanufacturing: Achieving Broad Access to Cell Therapy via Gene Editing and AI,” builds cell therapies that clean themselves.

To do so, Krishanu Saha, professor of Biomedical Engineering & Retina Research Foundation Kathryn and Latimer Murfee Chair, and his eam will explore how AI and advanced engineering can improve cancer treatments and accelerate future medical breakthroughs by making CAR T-cell therapies more reliable and affordable. These therapies have shown remarkable promise in treating some cancers, but their manufacturing process remains expensive and highly variable.

The team combines expertise in gene editing, immunology, imaging, biomaterials and biomanufacturing to create a self-correcting process capable of reducing costs and improving reliability. The project sits at the intersection of UW–Madison’s AI and THRIVE priorities by leveraging machine learning to enable advances in patient care.

“If we can make the process self-correcting, we cut costs and make these therapies available to far more patients,” says Saha.

This work sits squarely in the ‘curing disease’ and ‘workforce and manufacturing of the future’ challenge areas. They are building both a new medicine and a new way to make medicines at scale. Saha contends that no single lab could pull this off alone.

“Watching people from imaging, immunology, and manufacturing backgrounds find the shared thread in fifteen minutes of conversation was the best part of the process,” Saha says. “That’s the kind of connection that’s hard to plan for and easy to lose without a program like this.”

Making clinical AI more trustworthy

A new UW–Madison team is tackling one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption in health care: trust. “From AI Innovation to Clinical Impact: Closing the Gap for Reliable AI-based Disease Screening” was awarded $250,000 in seed funding through the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research’s Igniting Interdisciplinary Innovation (I³) initiative.

The project brings together Irene Ong, associate professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, and assistant professors Fred Sala (Computer Sciences), Maja Waldron (Statistics), Daniel Cho (Surgery) and Paula Voorheis (School of Pharmacy), the team aims to develop methods that make AI-based disease screening systems more reliable and practical for use in clinical settings. The project will initially focus on ovarian cancer and rare disease while developing approaches that can ultimately be applied to a broader range of diseases.

“AI-based screening tools show strong performance in research settings but often fail to translate into trustworthy, adoptable clinical tools,” Ong says. “By focusing on reliability and usability in the clinic rather than model accuracy alone, we are targeting the real bottleneck between AI innovation and clinical impact.”

The project combines expertise in trustworthy AI methods, health systems, clinical practice, clinical informatics, statistics, precision medicine, usability and behavioral science to address a problem that no single disciplinary perspective could solve independently. The I³ initiative’s unique requirements brought departments that don’t typically cross paths together to tackle tough societal problems.

Trust isn’t one problem — it’s several stacked on top of each other: models trained on data too sparse to generalize, tools that don’t fit how clinicians actually work, and predictions that can’t account for how a patient’s risk changes over time. No single discipline can close all three gaps. “A computer scientist can build a model that performs well on paper, but that doesn’t mean a clinician will trust it enough to act on it,” Ong says. “Having the models provide accurate uncertainty quantification of their predictions, so clinicians can understand how confident the model really is, having someone who understands clinical workflow well enough to know where it needs to fit, and someone who understands the disease well enough to know what ‘useful’ actually means. I³ is what allowed us to design all of that in one room from day one.”

That’s the substance behind the team: Maja Waldron’s work on reliable AI methods gives the models honest uncertainty estimates instead of false confidence; Fred Sala’s expertise with multimodal models and weak learning to harness longitudinal data; Daniel Cho ground the work in how screening actually happens in clinical and health-system settings; Paula Voorheis integrates behavioral science and human-centered design to improve how digital health innovations are developed, implemented, and experienced by patients and healthcare providers to improve patient–provider interactions within complex health systems; and Irene Ong’s work on explainable AI and causal methods connects it all to real patient data and outcomes from multiple health systems.

“Finding and working with members of our team, identifying our similar and synergistic goals, and pitching our idea, has been fun,” says Ong. “The best part has been the ability to start collaborating in a short period of time from the conception of our proposal as it has allowed us to build on our excitement to develop clinically relevant AI methods together to accomplish our goal of improving healthcare for everyone.”

 

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