Joyce Tait
Director of the ESRC’s Innogen Centre
University of Edinburgh
Professor Joyce Tait is Director of the ESRC's Innogen Centre (Innovation in Genomics) which is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. This is an interdisciplinary programme which brings together social scientists, technology and policy analysts, economists and lawyers to study the far-reaching social and economic implications of advances in the life sciences.
"I've had a very varied and exciting interdisciplinary career, mainly as an academic, with a short spell as a policy maker and adviser working for Scottish Natural Heritage. Taking an interdisciplinary career path can be much more uncertain and more risky than concentrating on a single discipline - you can spend three years working across a range of disciplines while your colleagues have spent the same length of time improving their career prospects by working on much more narrowly focused research. Even though the ESRC now gives a lot more emphasis to interdisciplinary research, single disciplines are still calling the shots."
