Channeling Da Vinci

I recently went to a meeting about high-performance computing on GPUs at Nvidia. A number of OSU faculty participated, including those from environmental engineering, computer science and machine learning, chemical engineering, and robotics. The discussions forced me to think of new ways of explaining and perceiving my own work. Given how much I learned about my colleagues and their research, it made me wonder why we don’t share our work across fields more often.

There are an infinite number of advantages to an academic culture that depends on diversifying collaborations rather than knowledge isolation. How much more could we learn from the perspectives from other disciplines? More importantly, how much are we missing in our own research by not participating in cross-disciplinary dialogue on a regular basis? The next generation of engineer will need to communicate to a broader audience, generate and formulate concepts that include the expertise from other disciplines, and, ultimately, channel Da Vinci through multi-disciplinary collaborations.

Considering that Leonardo Da Vinci, known as the “universal genius”, is considered one of the most diversely talented individuals in our history, the goal is an ambitious one.