Interdisciplinary research is a foundational element of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.
Across Trinity, faculty are leading initiatives that bring together scholars from the social sciences, natural sciences, and arts & humanities to tackle questions no single discipline can answer alone.
Since 2024, the Society-Centered AI Initiative (SCAI) incubates research on the co-evolution of artificial intelligence and human behavior, exploring both how AI will shape society and how social factors will shape AI.
Launched in 2025, the SPACE Initiative at Duke (Science & Policy to Advance Cosmic Exploration) unite cutting-edge research, targeted professional programs and strategic partnerships to pursue fundamental questions about the universe, pioneer innovations in space technology and educate the next generation of space researchers and policymakers.
Trinity has also expanded support for early-stage interdisciplinary work through a competitive 2026 call for proposals. Causality at Duke and BioTA: Biodiversity Through Arts are Trinity’s most recent research initiatives. Selected in 2026 from a competitive call for proposals, these interdisciplinary faculty-led projects that connect diverse fields from statistics to philosophy and biology to the arts. Each will receive $150,000 in seed funding over three years
Together, these four initiatives reflect Trinity's growing investment in research that crosses disciplinary lines to address complex questions. Through workshops, shared research infrastructure, public programming and student engagement, they create long-term intellectual communities and foster collaborations that extend beyond disciplines, and beyond institutions.
