COLUMN: As seen on TV – AU Viborg offers opportunities for large-scale interdisciplinary research and innovation
AU Viborg is far from being only for agricultural and animal researchers. If we’re to solve the major problems of our time, we must work together across disciplines, says Tech Dean Eskild Holm Nielsen, who sees great opportunities in involving, among others, computer scientists, medical researchers, humanities scholars and business economists, among others, in the research conducted in Viborg. The engineers are already here.
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It was dinnertime on a late summer evening a few months ago. The TV news was running, and host Erkan Özden introduced the next item.
Cut to a field in Foulum near Viborg, where grain and solar cells are side by side. Not as usual, where the solar cells are tilted towards the sun and cover the entire field. Here they stood upright, with broad strips of grain in between, so that the farmer could cultivate the field almost as normal.
That was the good news. A new experiment had shown that the field produced a very good harvest yield, even though there were solar cells in the field. And energy production was close to normal, even though the solar panels were positioned vertically to make room for the grain.
For Tech, this is a good example of interdisciplinary research between engineers and agricultural scientists. But it actually got even better.
Halfway into the TV News item, Professor Jessica Aschemann-Witzel from the Department of Management at Aarhus BSS was introduced. She had studied how people react to different solar cell installations– and they preferred the test field with vertical solar cells mixed with grain. They seemed less disruptive than traditional solar farms. They simply blended in better with the landscape.
The biggest problems are solved through interdisciplinarity
For me, this is a simple example of how the major challenges of our time – nature conservation, the climate crisis and the transition of the energy and food industries – can only be solved through interdisciplinary collaboration.
When we want to eat more plant proteins, it’s not enough to know everything about beans and legumes. It also requires knowledge of consumer behaviour. When grass fibres are to be used as building materials, it requires more than just knowledge of construction. New business models must also be developed. There are economic, cultural, health and scientific aspects to almost all of the green and digital transitions that society is currently undergoing.
Here, I’d like to join the TV News in promoting the opportunities we have for interdisciplinary research at the university's new green campus, AU Viborg.
A few years ago, Foulum was part of government research and focused narrowly on agriculture. Since then, engineers have moved in, particularly in relation to research on protein and energy. There is close collaboration with food research and climate research, among other areas, and with the new programmes at AU Viborg, a path has also been laid for the campus to grow in the coming years and brim with dynamism.
Large-scale opportunities for everyone
AU Viborg also offers plenty of room and opportunities for large-scale research and innovation across traditional research fields.
There are fields and nature, animals, stables and large-scale facilities for, for example, grass protein, CO₂ research and Power-to-X. Data scientists will be able to work with big data and artificial intelligence in agriculture; medical researchers can participate in research collaborations on food health or the link between climate change and public health; humanities scholars will be able to explore ethical and philosophical perspectives on biotechnology, genetics and animal research in the green transition, and business economists will be able to analyse markets and value chains for new, green protein products – just to let the imagination run free with a few examples of possible collaborations.
My point is that the green transition requires holistic and interdisciplinary research efforts that build on AU's strengths and combine technology, natural sciences, behavioural research, health, economics, ethics and social conditions.
I hope that all academic environments at AU will be inspired and see the opportunities in embracing AU Viborg. The door is open to Denmark's Green Campus.
Interdisciplinarity can point the way to solutions that not only the TV News wants to report on, but that society as a whole is calling for.
This text is machine translated and post-edited by Lisa Enevoldsen.