Molecular science and engineering: a powerful transdisciplinary approach to solving grand challenges

Abstract

The concept of molecular science and engineering – melding a deep understanding of molecular science with an engineering mind-set – is emerging as a powerful way to create novel, effective and sustainable solutions to global grand challenges, such as the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. By blurring the boundaries between scientific and engineering disciplines, in this holistic approach, final function and end-use requirements become an integral part of the underlying scientific research. Commercially ready materials can thus become a reality in an accelerated, flexible and economic manner. In other words, molecular science and engineering can fundamentally alter the way molecules are identified and designed for real-world usage. It is not enough to simply make molecules; we must make molecules work for a complex world. The notion of bringing researchers, industry and government communities together to work on grand challenges has a long and illustrious history – think, for instance, of the Manhattan Project, the industrial scale-up of penicillin and the Moon landings. More recently, the idea of ‘convergence’ – tackling grand challenges with a multifaceted array of scientists, engineers, clinicians and beyond – has become more formally recognised as a valuable way to stimulate societally important and ground-breaking research. Molecular science and engineering is a specific, yet far-reaching, part of this convergence landscape. Within the growing worldwide molecular science and engineering community, the Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering (IMSE) was founded in 2015 as Imperial College London’s newest Global Institute. The Institute’s overarching aim is to bring the College’s engineers, scientists, medics and business researchers together with a wide array of external stakeholders – and to remove the boundaries between these disciplines – to find innovative molecular-based science and engineering solutions to pressing grand challenge problems. Imperial’s world-class researchers and facilities, together with its existing culture of collaboration, multidisciplinarity, research translation and grand challenge goals, make the College the perfect home for IMSE. The Institute’s three guiding pillars – advancing integrated transdisciplinary research, transforming education and enabling effective translation of research to industry – are used to steer the Institute’s community-building activities and to help overcome obstacles that are commonly encountered during convergence-style and transdisciplinary research. Such issues include organisational barriers in academic institutions, personal motivational issues for researchers (e.g., measures of success), poor communication between traditionally separated disciplines and between academia, industry and government, as well as a scarcity of suitably trained (i.e., collaboration-ready) science and engineering graduates. To that end, IMSE manages a range of activities that foster innovation and collaboration. For example, IMSE co-ordinates bespoke workshops to bring its large community of Imperial-based affiliates, as well as external partners, together to focus on specific grand challenge problems and industrial needs. IMSE catalyses new collaborations through seed-funded projects that enable the first steps towards transformative research goals. IMSE’s unique Master’s of Research in Molecular Science and Engineering has been designed to train the next generation of scientists and engineers, who are equipped to work across the important molecular science/engineering interface.