While architects, engineers and construction workers focus on creating the McGill Sustainability Park’s physical spaces, members of an academic community of practice are laying a different type of foundation: they are developing McGill’s ReACT Hub model.
“ReACT – or Research to Action – Hubs are to be housed at the Park, serving as a nexus point for research done in conventional wet labs, computational labs and process labs,” said Rees Kassen, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and newly appointed Academic Director for the Sustainability Park.
“In contrast to traditional labs, they will be challenge-driven, collaborative hubs that will establish the Park as a destination for co-designed research. The goal will be to confront real-world sustainability challenges by convening researchers from across McGill – including natural sciences, engineering and arts and social sciences – to work alongside societal partners,” said Kassen.
“Hub members will work to foster different forms of dialogues in order to benefit from continuous, open and inclusive conversations among researchers, stakeholders and the wider public. The expectation is that this will include industry, government agencies, civil society and Indigenous knowledge-holders,” said Christopher Manfredi, Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic).
Beyond disciplinary boundaries
Though discovery-based scientific research will remain a major focus of the Park, members of the community of practice are also working on how the ReACT model can help researchers move beyond disciplinary boundaries and focus on bringing people together to tackle issues from as many vantage points as possible.
“The idea is to take a problem, question or challenge, then consider who could contribute to resolving it based on their expertise, regardless of the department within which they normally operate,” said Matthew Harrington, Professor in the Department of Chemistry and member of the community of practice.
“The ReACT Hubs allow us to organize around problem solving, based on the interests of the communities we serve,” said Elena Bennett, Professor in the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and member of the community of practice.
“The topics can be more bottom-up than in the traditional science model, one that is typically designed by researchers for researchers. In a ReACT Hub, we would instead start with a question brought to us by individuals, government, NGOs or industries,” she said.
The community of practice has a list of current McGill-led projects that are in line with the ReACT Hub model, demonstrating how collaborative and flexible approaches can work.
“In the case of my own research on multiple land use planning, some projects stemmed from the questions brought to us by locals, for example businesses around McGill’s Gault Nature Reserve.”
The local chamber of commerce found the results so useful that they awarded a prize to the Gault team for helping to enhance the social and economic vitality of the Vallée du Richelieu region.
“What it showed is that there’s real value in seeking to address people’s questions instead of only imagining them in an academic vacuum,” says Bennett.
To collaborate, just walk down the hall
Though many McGill researchers already collaborate with experts outside of their departments, they are often dependent on formal structures and procedures. The ReACT Hubs would promote more organic collaboration.
“There’s real value in having people in proximity to one another, in being able to walk down the hall rather than send a formal meeting invite or Zoom link – not to mention serendipity, improving one another’s research through unplanned interactions,” said Harrington, who experienced a different type of multidisciplinary research centre through one of Germany’s Max Planck institutes.
“Our department was filled with people with completely different backgrounds and expertise. That allowed for a lot of beneficial mixing. When it’s done right, it can be a very powerful model for innovation.”
For Bennett, the Stockholm Resilience Centre bears some resemblance to the ReACT model in terms of both tackling complex problems and co-production. However, there are also significant differences, including when and how partners integrate into the research process.
“We are developing a model where groups affected by research findings will be involved early,” she said.
Complex problems, multifaceted solutions
While the ReACT Hubs will coexist with traditional university research spaces, for another member of the community of practice, they are different for good reason:
“The ReACT Hubs are a new way for universities to connect with society, to solve the problems confronting us this century, moving away from the 18th-century model of a university,” said Andrew Gonzalez, Professor in Biology.
He points out that environmental change is extremely complex, disrupting our planet in varied and cumulative ways. For him, research needs to be just as multifaceted, considering simultaneously factors like biodiversity loss, climate disruption, social injustice, health inequities, emerging disease threats and forever chemicals.
“We’re not going to solve real-world, sustainability challenges unless we bring all of society together,” Gonzalez said.