The Brink: What Is Convergent Research and Why Is BU Embracing It?
Excerpt from The Brink | By: Andrew Thurston | March 6, 2025 | Photo: iStock
A couple of years ago, Boston officials asked environmental ecologist Lucy Hutyra if there was a way to predict whether updating building and zoning laws might help make the city more sustainable and less vulnerable to climate hazards, like increased temperatures and heat waves. Could the Boston University researcher forecast which law changes could have the biggest impact?
“We can’t do that—there’s no model that does that,” the College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor and chair of Earth and environment told them.
But the question got her thinking. Hutyra is an expert on how urbanization impacts climate and ecosystems and knows her field as well as anyone—having won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2023. She began talking with researchers both within and outside of her academic department and, together, she says, they “started to dream up ways of building new kinds of models to actually do it.” As Hutyra and her colleagues collaborated on their model, the project began drawing in more BU experts interested in climate change, including public health researchers. Soon, it had evolved to consider other aspects of climate impact, such as measuring and mitigating the effect of heat on health, and how that issue gets coupled to neighborhood design and construction.
This kind of collaboration is something that Hutyra is keen to do more of. And she hopes to take things a step further, too—not just bringing disciplines together, but also ultimately melding and merging them into something new in pursuit of a grand challenge. It’s an approach known as convergent—or convergence—research.
A striking physical manifestation of the University’s commitment to convergence is the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences. Designed as a vertical campus, the stunning tower is home to a BU-wide academic unit where many of the faculty have appointments that straddle data and computing fields and other academic disciplines. Like Ngozi Okidegbe, the first faculty at BU to hold a dual appointment crossing data and the law, who studies how algorithms shape the criminal justice system.