RESEARCH

New Director, New Direction at CID
Rosenzweig to Advance Interdisciplinary Approach

SIX MONTHS AGO, Mark Rosenzweig became the director of the Center for International Development (CID), taking on a challenge that spans the globe as well as the university. In an interview with the Bulletin, the public policy and development economist talks about his goals for the center under his new leadership.

What is your primary objective at the Center for International Development?
The challenge for me is to identify areas like, say, indoor air pollution, where there is expertise at Harvard but also which are under-researched and clearly multidisciplinary. The objective is to bring together faculty from different perspectives to work on such things in a way that couldn’t otherwise be done.

You’ve called indoor air pollution “the poster child” for what the center can do. Why is that?
Indoor air pollution is something that people don’t appreciate much, but it’s actually the number two killer in low-income countries. It’s estimated that up to 2 million people a year die from the pollution caused by using fuels such as wood and dung in close confines for cooking. This is a big health problem, and the solution obviously takes more than just saying that we should change their fuels. It involves thinking about energy policy, it has implications for the environment since it uses wood, and it obviously requires expertise in health and understanding the effects of smoke. You also need to understand behavior within the home, like who’s cooking. So there’s a gender aspect to it because we know that women tend to cook.

There are different notions of interdisciplinary work. How would you define yours?
The one that I dislike is where you bring together, say, an economist and a sociologist to fight over the right way to solve a problem. This is different, this is bringing people with different expertise together; it’s not like an economist is going to fight with someone from the School of Public Health on what the effects of third-party smoke are. The idea is not to change the way economists or sociologists do their work, it’s to bring them together to do work that combines their expertise to produce new work. It’s not to make the disciplines meld together.

It sounds like you are trying to bring fresh perspectives that incorporate much larger frameworks in looking at these problems.
There’s an amazing amount of good research at Harvard, and we want researchers to go where the science tells them, where the returns are in gaining knowledge. But we want them also to be attentive to the problems that are out there. These guys at Harvard are really good, they have the fresh perspectives. It’s my job to bring them together, make sure they’re heard, and make sure they can move in margins where the problems are important. But it still has to be driven by the science.

Some people have referred to the process of bringing academics together as the equivalent of herding cats. Have you found that to be true?
I’ve not had that problem at all. Everyone, in fact, is excited about doing this. It’s just that the institution is not set up for it. That’s why the center is here. In the development area at Harvard, everyone is committed to actually doing things that are relevant and scientifically sound. They enjoy the idea of working with others.