Benefits and obstacles of interdisciplinary research: Insights from members of the Young Academy at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Interdisciplinarity is often considered a key element of successful research projects.1 Funding organizations, for instance, promote interdisciplinarity by making it a key criterion for the selection of projects. Moreover, interdisciplinary work may help to overcome demanding situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. 2 While it is clear that interdisciplinarity is a target of policymakers and funding organizations, it is not entirely clear what the benefits of such research projects are and how they can be successfully conducted. In this Backstory, we aim to shed more light on these aspects. We offer a reflection of our own experiences with interdisciplinary research in the Young Academy of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a scholarly society and non-university research organization in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. The authors are fellows of the 7th program (topic: ''Collective decision-making'') and the 8th program (topic: ''Stability and instability'') of the WIN-Kolleg, which is an essential part of the Young Academy: in regular intervals, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities funds promising scholars (i.e., postdocs, research group leaders) who intend to conduct research projects over a period of three to five years within this program. The WIN-Kolleg is a prototypical example of the role interdisciplinarity plays for funding organizations. Only project teams that involve multiple disciplines are eligible for this funding, and developing scientific insights in an interdisciplinary way is a central goal of each project.