Training for Interdisciplinary Discovery

Many questions about consciousness, mental illness, personal agency, morality, and artificial intelligence cannot be answered by one field alone. And while interdisciplinary work is often celebrated in principle, it is difficult to carry out in practice. It asks people trained in different methods, vocabularies, and professional norms to do more than speak to one another; it asks them to be open to different modes of thinking and to commit to a shared project of discovery.

The challenge is especially sharp when neuroscience and philosophy collide. These disciplines employ vastly different methodologies, publication norms, research timelines, and ideas about what counts as progress. Neuroscientists are often trained to work in teams, design experiments, collect and interpret data, before publishing their results in multi-authored papers. Philosophers are trained to construct arguments, design thought experiments, develop concepts, and draw distinctions, culminating in solo published work. These differences can make collaboration difficult.

This is precisely why Felipe DeBrigard, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at Duke University, founded Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) in 2016. The seminars bring early-career neuroscientists and philosophers together for two intensive weeks of interdisciplinary training and collaboration, treating both fields as intellectually necessary for solving today’s challenges.

This is personally important for DeBrigard who nearly abandoned philosophy in graduate school due to its perceived incompatibility with neuroscience. His philosophy colleagues frowned upon his approach to understanding memory through both neuroscientific and philosophical lenses. To them, this did not constitute “real” philosophy, and they advised him to focus solely on neuroscience research. DeBrigard might have chosen a more traditional path had he not met a prominent neuroscientist and philosopher at a meeting later that year, who encouraged him to resist the temptation to abandon his interdisciplinarity. They noted that while both fields had independently contributed to our understanding of memory, an interdisciplinary approach was underexplored and could significantly contribute to future discoveries. That advice empowered DeBrigard to stay on an interdisciplinary path, shaping his career, and now enabling him to support others taking similar journeys.

SSNAP creates space to approach questions collaboratively and with enough depth to shape productive conversations. It also connects interdisciplinary scholarship to practical outcomes. Fellows have opportunities to develop projects as teams and apply to receive seed grants, helping move ideas into collaborative research. The program has led to co-authored chapters in a published SSNAP volume, showing how the intellectual work of the seminars can become a resource for a wider field.

Building an Interdisciplinary Community

SSNAP treats interdisciplinarity not merely as lip service, but as an essential ethos. The goal is not for philosophers to briefly learn about neuroanatomy, or for neuroscientists to take a cursory glance at moral theories. Rather, it is to create a shared intellectual space where both sides acquire deep knowledge in the other’s approach and then jointly explore complex problems.

This respectful and generative atmosphere is a product of a partnership between DeBrigard and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ph.D., co-directors of the SSNAP program. Sinnott-Armstrong is a Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the department of philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, whose work spans the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and law. Together, they have made SSNAP a place where fellows are supported to take intellectual risks, ask questions across disciplinary lines, and learn from one another without having to defend the legitimacy of their field. Careful preparation, topic selection, and speakers make deeper learning possible within a short summer program. The result is not a room divided between philosophers and neuroscientists, but a cohort of “SSNAPers,” with a shared identity formed by working side by side.

That community-building is intentional. SSNAP’s selection process aims for balance not only between neuroscience and philosophy, but across identities, to bring diverse perspectives into the room. Fellows also stay connected after the seminar through practical tools such as a Slack channel, reflecting an obligation to support one another and future cohorts. SSNAP makes that support concrete, giving fellows training and a professional community that can sustain them after the program ends.

A Model for Training Interdisciplinary Scholars

This summer, members of the Dana Foundation team attended SSNAP’s closing conference, where fellows, faculty, and invited speakers reflected on the questions raised by the ever-increasing presence of AI. The talks explored how to think about agentic AI models, how to use AI to better understand human cognition, and using AI models to create maps of shared moral principles and cross-cultural variations in emotion, morality and perception. Throughout the presentations and discussions, Dana staff witnessed camaraderie between fellows and learned more about the personal challenges and opportunities that emerge from interdisciplinary work. The closing conference provided a glimpse at what rigorous neuroscience and society work can look like when different disciplines meet on equal footing—a model that can prepare future scholars for a variety of career paths.

One of the speakers, Kim Stachenfeld, Ph.D., exemplified how interdisciplinary training can help chart professions beyond academia. As a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and an adjunct assistant professor at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, her career sits at the intersection of neuroscience, computation, and real-world application. At Google, Stachenfeld has helped design better AI models, while simultaneously using AI to learn more about our systems of memory. On a recent podcast, Stachenfeld noted how a philosophy course taught by Daniel Dennett, Ph.D., shaped her understanding of how human brains and AI models make decisions. Her professional trajectory is an example of how an interdisciplinary background can be a pathway to a career in industry, helping to develop tools that may someday be used by large portions of society.

For the Dana Foundation’s NextGen program, SSNAP is a strong example of one its objectives: encouraging rigorous, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary work between neuroscience and non-science disciplines to solve complex problems that cannot be answered by neuroscience alone. The program proposes an exciting framework for how scientists and scholars from the humanities can work together. It demonstrates that true collaboration isn’t achieved through proximity alone—it requires structure, leadership, trust, time, and a community that continues long after a single engagement. SSNAP offers more than a successful summer program; it offers a model for how serious interdisciplinary fields can be built. By combining intellectual rigor with sustained community, equal respect for different methods, and concrete pathways for collaboration, SSNAP shows how scholars can move beyond shared interest toward shared work.