interdisciplinary

For the last three summers, Rochester undergraduates have worked to analyze and preserve the ancient forts along the coast of Ghana, while exploring the historical and cultural context of the structures they study.

How do you convey a 91,000-square-foot castle with more than 160 rooms on the Ghana coast, back to Rochester, so at any time you could take a virtual tour as if you were really there? Or study the castle’s structure brick by brick?

To Joan Shelley Rubin, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, and Wendi Heinzelman, dean of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, engineering and the humanities are strongly connected.

Seniors Melissa Wen, Nathan Nickerson, and Jarrod Young are this year's winners of the Wells Award, given each year to high-achieving students in the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences who also excel in the humanities.

The Early Worlds Initiative—an interdisciplinary research project at the University of Rochester—connects faculty researching social and cultural developments worldwide from medieval times to the early modern period.

From the post-Reformation trauma of Shakespeare's history plays, to the poignant scrapbooks created by the families of British soldiers killed in World War I, the fellowships sponsored by the Humanities Center this year focus on the interdisciplinary study of memory and forgetting.

Meet Michele Rucci, a new professor in the University's brain and cognitive sciences department, and his robot “Mr. T.” Rucci and his robot are using eye-tracking tools and virtual reality to replicate the small eye movements experienced by humans.

By the time they graduate from the University of Rochester, students will have take 128 credits and only one required course. “More than 90 percent of incoming students surveyed last year indicated that Rochester’s unique curriculum had a positive to strongly positive effect on their decision to enroll,” says Executive Director of College Enrollment Scott Clyde.

Urban studies, neuroeconomics and international relations, and digital communications: these are just some of the interdisciplinary majors students have crafted by availing themselves to the independent nature of the Rochester Curriculum.

Twenty-five years ago, the chairs of the religion and physics departments united in a common goal: To rid the undergraduate curriculum of mandatory courses students didn’t want to take, and give students the freedom to delve more deeply into the subjects they loved.