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The Graduate School of Life Sciences and Future Food Utrecht joined forces to launch the interdisciplinary master course: Societal challenges for Life Scientists. Students were challenged to come up with research questions and proposals to tackle complex issues regarding Food and health. The topic of this course was milk: from early life nutrition and immune fitness to livestock welfare and the environmental impact of milk production.

As Prof. dr. ir. Alexander van Oudenaarden, director of the Hubrecht Institute and 2017 Spinoza Award winner has said: "Top science is team work. Interdisciplinary research is key to solving the scientific challenges of today”.

The Graduate School of Life Sciences could not agree more and therefore wants to prepare its Master’s students for working in interdisciplinary teams after graduation.          

The course hosted 15 students from different disciplines within Life Sciences, who worked together for two weeks. They were supervised by teachers from different disciplines and aided by other experts in the field, such as researchers from Danone-Nutricia. The final presentations impressed the jury of experts.  Students remarked that the course gave them a higher awareness of bias, improved ability to value other perspectives and a good insight in the demands of interdisciplinary teamwork.

Future Food Utrecht expert, Marca Wauben was very pleased with the results: “The students in this course were very enthusiastic, much more than I have seen in a long time with other courses. It was a pleasure to teach this course and it had added value for me to teach an interdisciplinary group”.

Mieke Lumens, one of the course coordinators from Life Sciences: “I was impressed by the range of researchers involved in the Future Food network and even more by their willingness to contribute to this course. It is amazing how rapidly students with different backgrounds grew accustomed to the concept of interdisciplinary research and came forward with new project ideas. There will definitely be a next edition of this course, and then we hope to involve even more disicplines.”