Picking a PIK no easy task

When it comes to picking a PIK professor, the requirements are stiff, and the stakes are high.

PIK, or Penn Integrates Knowledge, professors hold joint appointments in two departments in two schools in the University. They teach courses and direct research within their interdisciplinary field, collaborating with colleagues and students in both schools. The program is a highlight of the Penn Compact, Penn President Amy Gutmann's blueprint for Penn's future success.

It's an elite handful - since Gutmann launched the initiative in 2005, only eight new professors have been appointed to the program. Eventually, at least 18 PIK professors will come to the University.

And the program's interdisciplinary nature is unique to Penn, said Vice Provost for Research Steven Fluharty, who doesn't know of any peer institution with such a "well-orchestrated strategy" for advancing and promoting interdisciplinary work.

The process starts when Gutmann and Provost Ron Daniels issue a "call to nomination" that invites deans and department chairs to search for potential candidates.

"After the challenge is issued, the hard work of identifying [and of] wooing these candidates really falls to colleagues who know these fields well," Daniels said.

"One of the really defining parts of this process is that it is really a bottom-up process."

After the nominations, candidates are evaluated on qualifications that are both simple and stringent: their whole body of work.

"The process for choosing a PIK [professor] is basically to look for scholars and teachers who are the very best in their interdisciplinary area, who have a lot to contribute to Penn by way of pathbreaking research and teaching," Gutmann said.

"The education and research priorities go hand-in-hand," Daniels added.

Sarah Tishkoff, a human-genetics researcher and Penn's sixth PIK professor, said she was attracted to the program because it allowed her to collaborate with colleagues in several departments but also interact with undergraduate and graduate students.

For her, "the teaching is a stronger component" of the appointment.

Another unique aspect of the program both Tishkoff and Fluharty noted is that all of Penn's 12 schools are located on one central campus, making interdisciplinary work more feasible.

"I can't emphasize enough how physical proximity like that greatly facilitates collaborative research," Fluharty said.

Ultimately, though, the PIK program's greatest strength as it grows will be its ability to fuse disciplines as technology advances.

"With such rapid change in academic landscapes, traditional fields and the boundaries that exist between them tend to melt away," Fluharty said.

He added that Penn encourages interdisciplinary work beyond the PIK program through the creation of centers and institutes like the new Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Interdisciplinary work is "the way of the future," Tishkoff said. "Some of the most cutting-edge, novel research findings are going to come about by people who are using an interdisciplinary approach."

The work "is more responsibility, it takes more time, and there are more meetings, but ... I think that it's worth it."

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