Tackling today’s biggest challenges takes more than expertise in a single field. Issues like misinformation, climate change and chronic health problems are too complex for any single discipline to address. Pioneer Academics’ recent panel on interdisciplinary learning shows how combining multiple perspectives and skills is key to finding innovative solutions—and how students in programs like the Global Problem Solving Institute (GPSI) are leading the charge.
Why Complex Problems Need a Collaborative Approach
During the session, Brian Cooper, Director of Research and Development at Pioneer Academics, emphasized the power of interdisciplinary learning. “Unless we look at these complex problems from a variety of disciplines, we’re not going to be able to identify the problem, let alone come up with potential solutions,” he said. Real-world challenges like misinformation require collaboration between experts in technology, psychology, law, ethics and more. Cooper highlighted that interdisciplinary thinking helps students connect the dots across sectors and discover more innovative and effective solutions.
But how does this play out in practice? Dr. David Gatchell, a clinical professor at Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute, gave a behind-the-scenes look at how GPSI students engage in problem-solving. He shared the journey of a student named Terrence, who tackled chronic disease by integrating insights from medical anthropology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering. By learning from different fields, Terrence and his team developed a well-rounded understanding of the health problem they were addressing.
“What’s exciting about this process is how the students are forced to think about problems from multiple angles, often stepping outside their comfort zone,” explained Gatchell. This real-world, hands-on learning experience mirrors how experts from diverse fields must work together to solve global challenges.
Systems Thinking: Breaking Down Big Problems
A key takeaway from Gatchell’s segment was the importance of what’s called “systems thinking.” Complex issues like chronic disease are made up of many interconnected parts. By learning to map out these connections, students can better understand the problem and see where to intervene for the greatest impact. “The more perspectives they bring into their analysis, the deeper their understanding becomes of how the problem works—and, more importantly, how to address it,” said Gatchell.
Both Cooper and Gatchell stressed that interdisciplinary learning is not just about acquiring knowledge—it’s about applying it. “You’re going to have to analyze, synthesize, and integrate insights from various perspectives,” Cooper added, reinforcing the idea that collaboration and creativity are key to solving today’s complex problems.
Programs like the Global Problem Solving Institute are giving students the skills they need to tackle the world’s toughest challenges. As Gatchell summed it up, “Interdisciplinary problem-solving isn’t just about knowing more; it’s about learning to collaborate and communicate across fields, creating solutions that are far more impactful than what any one discipline can achieve alone.”
With experiences like these, students gain the tools to become the next generation of problem solvers, ready to take on the interconnected challenges of today’s world.
00:00:09 Adam (Pioneer Academics): Alright. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone, and welcome to our session on Power of Interdisciplinary Insights in Solving Complex Problems.
The central theme of today’s panel is to explore how interdisciplinary approaches can uniquely equip students to identify and solve complex problems that matter. To them we will use Pioneer Academics, latest educational initiative, which Brian will introduce in a moment as a case study to better understand how to combine multiple skills, methods and mindsets, to generate creative, collaborative and impactful solutions.
We have two amazing experts. Today, we have Brian Cooper, the Director of Research and Development for Pioneer Academics.
Brian has nearly 30 years of educational experience and has spent 25 years at Duke’s University Town identification program and we also have a Dr. David Gatchell, a clinical professor at Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute and the Director of Manufacture of the Manufacturing and design Engineering program at Northwestern University.
So without further ado, I’ll hand it over to Brian to get us started today.
00:01:18 Brian Cooper (Pioneer): Thank you so much, Adam. It’s great to be here. Welcome, everyone. Thank you, David, for collaborating. I’m really looking forward to. This time we have together. So we’re going to jump right in to again the power of interdisciplinary insights in solving complex problems. So just this week 2 pieces of news came across my feed that relate directly to what we’re talking about.
Here you see, Bill Gates talking about the number one unsolvable problem facing today’s young people. What is that problem? Artificial intelligence and its role in misinformation? And you see here, Bill Gates, saying, this is the problem that he had to punt on that. It’s 1 that we, the older generation, are handing to you the younger generation, the students out there.
Another piece of news. This is an opinion piece from the Financial Times, talking about the need to connect the economic dots when we think about the housing crisis. And this columnist talks about this idea of systems thinking, a way of looking at root causes and looking at both the economic and political implications of the housing crisis and systems. Thinking is a set of tools that help us look at and connect those dots.
If we think back to Bill Gates and that complicated complex problem of misinformation, take just a moment if you’re in the audience and think about the academic disciplines or industries that are involved in this field that would be a part of addressing this problem.
00:03:16 Brian Cooper (Pioneer): Well, it doesn’t take long to think about computer science and technology industries, media companies, government, political science, law, psychology, neuroscience. How we process things. Why, we believe what we do, even of course, ethics. All of these things come together. And unless we look at these complex problems from a variety of disciplines. We’re not going to be able to identify the problem, let alone come up with potential solutions for that problem. And then we have to apply this idea of systems thinking to connect those dots across multiple disciplines in meaningful ways.
Here you see the world economic forums, global risk report. This is something that they put out every year. Here you see, the problems that they believe these governmental and economic leaders anticipate are the greatest threats to the world. And you see, of course, misinformation and disinformation. You see societal polarization. And you see the way misinformation and disinformation feed directly into that polarization. But you see other things related to climate change and chronic health.
And so all of the problems, if you think about them. If you look at this list. You think about the problems that you care about the problems that others care about. They are complex problems, they defy easy, simple solutions. They defy the siloed academic approach that Dr. Wagner talked about earlier. And this is why interdisciplinary learning experiences are so critical in developing the skills and applying the knowledge and understanding. Again, Dr. Wagner, in his keynote, talked about how it’s not about what you know, but it’s about how you can use what you know and interdisciplinary learning, interdisciplinary thinking.
By its very nature, requires you to apply what you’re learning. So let’s think about the ways in which interdisciplinary problem solving empowers student learning. It does so by developing students, understanding of and appreciation for complexity, both generally the idea of a complex problem, but also more specifically, the problem that they’re working on.
They’re going to learn about the different aspects from different disciplines that affect that particular problem. It stimulates their curiosity. It exposes students to different points of views and different perspectives. Maybe they come in with a particular interest, but as they’re exposed to the interdisciplinary implications, it can peak their curiosity in fresh and new ways, giving them new ways into a particular problem.
00:06:40 Brian Cooper (Pioneer): It reinforces their conceptual understanding of what they’re learning by requiring that application of understanding in authentic, real world context, this is something that goes well beyond the classroom. You’re not learning for a test, but you’re learning because you’re applying what you’re learning in solving this real world problem that you, as a student or a team and others care about. Again, Dr. Dr. Wagner, talked about that importance of intrinsic motivation, something that you care about discovering and cultivating your interest and passion, and the best interdisciplinary problem solving allows you to do that while requiring higher order thinking skills. So by its nature, as you’re studying and learning all of these different approaches, you’re going to have to analyze, you’re going to have to synthesize, to integrate insights from various perspectives. You’re going to have to evaluate those insights against one another, make trade-offs, make compromises to decide in this context with this problem. Which of these insights for this audience for these stakeholders seems more or less important.
And then ultimately, at the very top of Bloom’s taxonomy. You’re going to be creating a new, more sophisticated understanding of the complex problem, its impacts and potential solutions
in the process you are going to be honing collaboration and communication skills. Because again, as Dr. Wagner talked about innovation. Complex problem solving is collaborative. It’s virtually impossible for one person to possess all of the knowledge, all of the experiences, all of the insights and perspectives that are needed to address these types of problems.
And finally, you’ll notice the former English teacher and me. I’m a big fan of alliteration. And so we have all of these C’s complexity, curiosity, conceptual understanding. There’s one variation here, but it’s a very important one, Interdisciplinary problem solving empowers students learning by centering uncertainty and this is sometimes very uncomfortable for students. But you have to embrace what you don’t already know in order to learn anything, let alone to wade into and to try to solve a complex problem.
00:09:41 Brian Cooper (Pioneer): So with that, I’m really excited to announce officially Pioneer’s newest initiative and it’s going to be a case study that Dr. Gatchell is going to talk about and use as an example, showing you what individual students and teams did in this program in this new institute and the ways in which it demonstrates these various aspects that we’ve talked about here.
So this new institute is called the Global Problem Solving Institute.
And as the name suggests, it’s organized around solving complex global problems. And there are 3 curricular components or pillars, 3 legs of a stool for this program.
The first is what we call systems, thinking. You may recall that reference to that news story or that opinion article where we were talking about connecting the dots systems. Thinking requires us to look at a complex problem, break it down into its component parts, and look at how they relate to one another, looking for where we can intervene in a particularly effective and meaningful way.
The second major curricular component is this interdisciplinarity looking at a particular problem through 3 specific disciplinary lenses. And there are a couple of different ways that we can think about interdisciplinarity. One is for all of the students or all of the team members to learn something about all 3 of the disciplines.
Another way of thinking about interdisciplinarity is to have individuals doing a deeper dive, developing a deeper expertise in their particular area of interest, and then bringing all of those people, together with their specific disciplinary perspectives and the global problem solving institute actually combines both of these methods. So all of the students in a particular problem will spend time in each of the 3 disciplines learning about those disciplines, and how they connect to the larger problem and to the problem that they want to investigate themselves.
And then they will have the opportunity to do a deeper dive in what we call intensives, where the team breaks up and individuals go and learn something new, different, deeper, more sophisticated about one of the disciplines and then bring it back to the team collaboration.
And the last element of the GPSI experience is design thinking and design thinking, as these graphics represent centers, our problem solving around the people the human beings that are actually impacted by the problem, and it challenges us. It requires us to go out to talk to those people, to discover what they’re saying and thinking and feeling, and how that translates into needs that we can actually meet.
And so, in addition to thinking about interdisciplinarity in terms of specific academic disciplines, we’re also bringing in these disciplines of systems, thinking and design thinking into a really unique innovative program and experience that is really unlike anything that high school students have access to out there, and so we’re tremendously excited about this before I pass it off to Dr. Gatchell. I wanted to say that we are going to be hosting a longer event in which we’ll be going into much deeper detail about the global problem solving Institute. And you can register for that event using this QR. Code. It’ll be 3 weeks from today. And I hope that if you’re interested in this type of learning, whether you’re a student, a parent or an educator
and IEC, please come. We’d love to talk more with you about this exciting initiative at Pioneer.
Now, from a context perspective, one of the problems that’s available in the global problem. Solving Institute is called disabling diseases addressing the challenges of chronic conditions.
And you may recall in the world Economic Forum global risk map chronic medical conditions was one of those global risks that face us. 71% of deaths globally every year are because of chronic medical conditions, and many of those are occurring in young people what we might call premature deaths.
And so this particular problem is structured in such a way that students and teams are going to be learning systems, thinking if they’re going to be looking at chronic medical conditions through the lenses of medical anthropology, which is the social, cultural and economic factors that relate to health and wellness and disease, neuroscience and psychology and biomedical engineering.
And so here we see another important aspect of interdisciplinarity that we have different broad domains represented. We have a social science, we have a life science, and we have an applied and physical science from biomedical engineering, and it’s important to bring those perspectives together.
And so with that, I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Gatchell, who’s going to walk through some of the experiences that a team who just completed this experience went through as they were thinking about chronic disease and a disease and a project that mattered to them and to other people.
And we’re again. We’re thinking about this as a case study. So as we’re going through, think about where you see examples of complexity, of curiosity, of student interest, emerging, of collaboration and communication and critical thinking, and all of those types of things. So take it away, Dr. Gatchell.
00:16:36 David Gatchell: Alright. Thank you very much, Brian. For those of you who are joining us today. I have to tell you that it is an honor to be on this side of the camera. I’ve been working with Pioneer for over a couple of years, and just to give you a little bit of history. I was a physics major as an undergrad, and my PhD in biomedical engineering.
And one of the reasons I went from physics to biomedical engineering is, I really wanted to make a difference within my lifetime. I wanted to work on problems. Today. I had my efforts be reflected within my lifetime to make the world a better place.
And so one of the reasons I wanted to give you that background is, I’m now working in this disabling diseases problem space within the global problem solving institute. And I believe that all the students that are participating in this institute are being given the tools to address problems real right now, problems that hopefully they can see the results of their efforts within their lifetime, which is, I think, something that all of us strive for.
So I’m going to be sharing my screen. It’s going to be a slightly different approach than what Brian did, because I’m going to be sharing with you some student work. I’m going to be using a tool called Miro. And so, it’s an online whiteboard tool. And I’m going to be moving through several different boards.
So let me start off with just giving you a little bit of background as students participate in the global problem solving institute with me or other instructors within the program. They’re going to go through a series of stages. They’re going to go through a stage where they learn about the problem space in this case disabling diseases. Then they’re going to learn about the space through the lens of a content expert. Our first content expert is Professor Helen Cho, and she’s going to introduce students to what healthcare looks like through the lens of medical anthropology.
00:18:46 David Gatchell: After spending some time with Professor Cho, the students then move on to working with Professor Bradley Gibson from Notre Dame University, and they’ll learn about neuroscience and psychology and some of the mechanisms within the brain in the neural system, and how they play out in terms of how we perceive the world, how we perceive stress and the implications for healthcare and then the last content expert that the students learn from is Professor Dave O’Neill, a peer of mine here at Northwestern University, who then looks at the problem through the lens of biomedical engineering, and how an engineer looks at healthcare and the tools and approaches that that engineer will use.
Once the students have gone through that progress or that process. They then go through an intensives week. Brian, as he was speaking, was talking about how all the students get exposed to all 3 disciplines which I already described, but then they spend one week where they divide and conquer.
00:19:51 David Gatchell: Members of the team will go and spend an intensives week with Helen Cho and medical anthropology, and with Brad Gibson in neuroscience and psychology, and with Dave O’Neill in biomedical engineering. And after they go through that intensives week. They then come back together with a deeper understanding of those disciplines, and they look at the problem that they’ve been addressing somewhat differently.
And I’m going to take you through that evolution through a set of weekly reflections that the students do in the program. I’m going to start off by showing you reflections from all members of a team. And then we’re going to follow the journey of a student, Terrence, as he goes through these different disciplinary modules, and we’re going to look at how his perspective
changes as a result of these modules. And then we’re going to see how he comes back together with his team to make a decision as to which problem they want to work on.
They’re going to do a final design sprint. And we’re going to look at some of their final results.
All right, let’s get started.
00:21:00 David Gatchell: So the first slide we see here it is a little bit small. But this was after one week within the program, the students were introduced through some lectures and some readings on what really is health and what really is disease, and what does it mean to live with a chronic disease?
And one of the sources that the students were exposed to is from the book switch how to change things when change is hard by Chip and Dan Heath. And so students tend to really like this reading. And we see that 3 of our 4 students, when asked to reflect on that week, chose that reading as being most critical to what they are interested in, and the way that you can look at this slide is, you can see that I’ve captured what they used as a course deliverable for inspiration. They were asked to reflect on how maybe the learnings from that source could be used in identifying a problem space that they’re interested in.
And then what I’ve tried to do is I’ve tried to summarize the take home messages for each student. So if I start in the upper left the student talks about using switch how to change things when change is hard.
00:22:17 David Gatchell: They identify the fact that the problem space they’re working on is related to chronic diseases, and they pull out this idea of bright spots, which is what they learned in their reading from switch. And a bright spot is where you’re essentially crowd sourcing. And you’re looking for people in a deadly or wicked problem that maybe are doing things a little bit differently than others. Maybe there’s some people that are still thriving, even though everybody else isn’t. We could think about that, maybe going back to the epidemic with Covid. Were there people that were actually surviving that epidemic a little bit better than others? And what can we learn from them? If we have to face an epidemic in the future? Right? We consider those to be bright spots.
And so in summary after the first week, we see that students are focused on this idea. They’re also understanding that if we’re going to understand a problem, we need to be able to understand it through the perspective of multiple people, people that have skin in the game people that are concerned with a problem. We refer to them as stakeholders and we also understand that stakeholders in different parts of the world are going to be different from each other. They’re going to have different cultural norms, and that’s going to be an important theme throughout the 12 weeks. But we start to plant the seed here.
In week 2, I’ve now we’re now following Terrence specifically and he has chosen one of the optional readings in which it was a focus on in some countries, I think Denmark has led this effort. I think it goes all the way back to the early to mid 19 hundreds, where they started to put a tax on sugary drinks. And so, in his reflection, Terrence talks about. Yes, I’m looking for bright spots. Still, I’m still looking for places. Where maybe there’s less obesity in the world. Maybe where people are eating a little bit more healthy. He’s kind of converged on that as an issue. He’s learned in this week that the second leading cause of cancer is obesity after smoking, and he wants to understand better. How that might be addressed.
00:24:34 David Gatchell: One of the things that he identifies in his reflection is that tobacco use, particularly in the United States, and Terrence is from the Toronto area in Canada and in even in Canada. Tobacco use has gone way down in these countries because of taxation on tobacco and because of efforts in terms of informational campaigns.
And so he’s wondering if we can learn from countries like Denmark. Can we learn from efforts like taxation on tobacco, to systematically focus on taxation, of unhealthy foods, and through the funds that we generate. Can we improve healthcare moving into Week 3. Now we’re going to start to see a slight change in Terrence’s perspective. He’s now learning through materials provided by Professor Helen Cho. Again, who’s a medical anthropologist, and one of the things that the students, or one of the readings of the students are exposed to. Here is a case study involving a character by the name of Juan Garcia. Juan Garcia was a man who was born in Puerto Rico, and then immigrated to the United States and ended up developing a very severe drinking problem as life dealt him very challenging circumstances.
00:25:56 David Gatchell: The interesting thing about this case study, though through the lens of a medical anthropologist is, it doesn’t blame Juan Garcia solely for his behavior. It exposes students to the idea of socioeconomic social, cultural norms, socioeconomic factors that have a huge influence on our behavior and you can see in Terrence’s reflection.
He identifies the importance in healthcare of understanding the community, its characteristics, the preferences of the individuals that comprise it and brings up the idea that if we’re going to really move healthcare, forward personalized medicine is the route that we need to take, and we need to take into account socio cultural factors that can have an effect on one’s health.
This is a direct reflection on the information and the content that he’s learning through. The medical anthropologists lens.
Week 4 is a continuation of the medical anthropology module. Terrence has looked at a paper on a case study involving leprosy. Leprosy has a real stigma to a stigma to it, and it’s interesting. If you study it in different countries, you’re going to see in some cases that people have. Leprosy are truly considered to be a social outcast, where in other countries, they’re actually accepted within the community and the take home message in his reflection is that every country is going to require a different set of custom solutions because of the cultural differences and the differences in what a medical anthropologist calls ethno medicine.
We tend to go into medical situations, particularly if we’ve gone through traditional education. Thinking medicine is of a certain form. A medical anthropologist will challenge that notion and say, No, that’s actually biomedicine or Western medicine. It is a specific ethno medicine, and if you study other cultures, you’ll realize that the vast majority of people, particularly in developing nations, do not go to traditionally trained Western medicine doctors. They go to other types of alternative medical practitioners just for time. I’m streamlining what’s going to follow next.
In week 5, Terrence and his teammates were now working with Professor Gibson, learning about neuroscience and psychology and a concept that they learn about during this time is a lot of students. When they take biology, they learn about the concept of homeostasis, the idea of the body maintaining balance. The more recent research talks about predictive regulation, not reacting after the effect, but trying to react before something happens.
This idea of allostasis can be related to how our bodies respond to stress, how we respond to anticipation. How we respond to expectation, and the power of allostasis is if we are in a stressful situation, chronically our blood pressure will go up.
00:29:28 David Gatchell: We will end up, maybe with a higher need for calories, because we can comfort ourselves through overeating. And so that predictive regulation piece has an effect to benefit us, but it can also have an effect of leading to some less optimal outcomes.
We go into Week 6. We’re still working with Professor Gibson and Terrence captures the fact that imbalance in the activity of the human, the human brain’s default network could be responsible for many issues, such as sleep, imbalance, so that a default network has to do with our stasis, it also has to do with how do we take in information? Do we take in information from external stimuli? Or do we take in information from our memories and our impressions?
But this idea of the default network being responsible for something such as sleep imbalance. He drills a little bit deeper. He starts talking about the idea of blue light that we receive from some of our technology like our phones and our tablets and our computers. There’s a lot of work by companies to try to reduce blue light, and he’s understanding that not all sleep is considered to be the same.
Some people will come up with a metric of well, how many hours did I get? He’s delving deeper than that. He’s understanding that not all sleep is created equal, and that rem sleep and deep sleep, as part of the overall number of hours is very, very important and he sees these ideas of understanding, rem sleep, understanding, deep sleep, and maybe being able to measure these is the idea of bright spots or root causes of problems.
He’s also learning in this week that psychedelics are on the cutting edge of research in terms of their ability to affect the human brain’s default network. But he dismisses exploring that because of potential legal issues both in Canada and in the United States.
00:31:41 David Gatchell: Moving on to week 7. He’s now working, and all teammates are working with Professor O’Neill, learning about how a biomedical engineer works or addresses a healthcare issue and if you study the Food and Drug Administration in the United States. You will see that the way in which they propose you design something is using the design waterfall. And what’s integral to the design. Waterfall model is the idea of identifying real stakeholder needs. So one of the things that Terrence discusses in his learning log is that there is a model that the FDA proposes, but bringing home that importance of empathy and the understanding of the needs of designs of different stakeholders, which has been something that’s been emphasized for the 1st 6 weeks. He understands that it’s integrated into this design waterfall model, so that kind of brings it back home. It reaffirms it in his mind.
00:32:42 David Gatchell: In week 8, Professor O’Neill introduces the students to the idea of noncompliance. Noncompliance adds to the wickedness of a problem. One can imagine coming up with the best healthcare solutions possible. Giving them to individuals, and then individuals not practicing those solutions. What is one to do as an a designer, a scientist, an engineer.
And so, having identified non-compliance as a potential issue, Terrence turns that back around to well, let’s look for bright spots to address the non-compliance issue.
And that’s let’s also leverage some of the tools of medical anthropology and psychology that are going to shape non-compliant behavior. So what we’re seeing in his comments is we’re seeing him taking learnings from the 1st couple of weeks with the bright spots we’re seeing him, considering the information from Professor Cho the information from Professor Gibson, and then integrating that within the context that Professor O’Neill, their biomedical engineering professor, has challenged them with after he’s come out of these logs. Throughout this process
Terrence and his teammates have had to create system maps like the one that Brian shared and then bring those maps together.
I want to share a quote from Terrence that we call them causal loop maps, and this is what he said, when he was comparing his individual map to that of that of his team. He said, my causal loop map considers the central issue of sleep deprivation.
00:34:36 David Gatchell: Sorry I’m blocking myself in terms of what this says, and the scope of neuroscience and psychology which considers the impacts of sleep, deprivation, and possible treatment options mentioned but mentioned by Professor Gibson, has on the mind has on the mind and human physiology.
The Consolidated Map. Again, that’s a map that was created by all team members from the Consolidated map, I was able to better see the issue of sleep deprivation in the perspectives of a medical anthropologist because a teammate had spent time studying that more than he had, and a biomedical engineer, because a teammate had spent more time studying it than he had, and, more most importantly, how the 3 fields tie in with that together. So.
00:35:26 Brian Cooper (Pioneer): David. I’m sorry I’m sorry to interrupt, but we are gonna have to end it there. I think that is a that is a good place to, to kind of wrap up, and that we see Terrence kind of communicating and reflecting how his field of vision was expanded through both. What he had learned in these different disciplines, but also from the impacts from his teammates. So there’s a lot more to share and learn about GPSI. Please visit the program fair, or sign up for that longer information session. 3 weeks from today we would love to talk more with you about this exciting new initiative, and Dr. Gatchell, thank you so much for your work and for walking us through Terrence’s journey that demonstrates so many of the things that are so powerful about interdisciplinary learning.
00:36:23 David Gatchell: Thank you so much for having me.
00:36:25 Adam (Pioneer Academics): Absolutely thank you both for coming and thank you all for watching today’s session. I sure learned a lot, and that was very interesting for me, but
sure to stick around for our next session. We’re a little bit over time. Session 3, where we talk a little bit about publications and the pursuit of authentic achievements.
Thank you so much for coming.
00:36:46 Brian Cooper (Pioneer): Thanks. Adam.
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