Divya Nag: Benefits of Multidisciplinary Exposure

What was your most. What do you remember as your best interdisciplinary experience? I guess I'll start so at this. I think the Stanford School of Medicine does a fantastic job of this. It's literally mixing like surgery with computer science, with mechanical engineering. I worked at the Stem Cell Institute for two years doing research. I think our most important breakthroughs and technological advancements were literally from other professors from other departments coming in and saying, hey, have you guys ever thought of attaching electrodes to those cells? Or have you ever thought about passing a current through something? And these are just things that I feel like individuals are so siloed in their own particular research areas that in any other institution, if you didn't have that kind of cross pollination of ideas and that constant dialogue between people, you just wouldn't get those advancements.

And it's physically obvious when you come here. Now, we were commenting before we came in. I mean, the buildings that are here that weren't here even 10 years ago, and they're all right next to each other and they're physically facilitating cross pollination between the different departments is amazing. I mean, I studied product design, which is a hybrid of mechanical engineering and art design. And at the time that was a really big deal. And now it's. It's those types of people working with people in the med school, working with people in the double E department. I mean, it's really fantastic. I think a lot of new businesses are going to come out of those types of opportunities as opposed to the more traditional siloed EE situation or CS only situation. It's pretty exciting.