As part of our work on a new strategy for ILRI, Delia asked some questions related to ILRI’s work at the interface of animal and human health.  If you have some further ideas or comments triggered by this post, please feel free to share them!

With thanks to those people who replied, here’s a quick re-cap of what we heard:

Specialize or generalize in house?

Probably both (in the spirit of ‘diversity’)! What we DON’T want are vets and economists who undervalue the other discipline.

All knowledge is one, but often separated only for didactic reasons, so all endeavours should be towards inter-disciplinarity. How we do this will continue to be a challenge

Specialists, but with a sufficient understanding of the other disciplines, so that they understand their relevance and how they can complement each other. Activities such as the ILRI APM and other discussion forum may help individuals understand the different specialties “available” at ILRI and how they can work together?

ILRI is a good place for inter-disciplinary work, given the challenges we have and topics we cover; but also applying inter-disciplinary work in-house could influence other partners to do the same. The key for inter-disciplinary work is that each specialist has a general understanding of different areas of knowledge, to help her/him to communicate properly with other specialists, but more importantly to recognize the relevance of the contribution different areas could do in ILRI’s work.

ILRI needs a mix of specialists who can also be generalists when it comes to working together – otherwise there is just polarisation. It’s a mindset about working together. In a university setting, you get expert molecular biologists working closely with mathmaticians and evolutionary biologists and sociologists. It should be able to happen at ILRI too (albeit with a different mix of disciplines!).

Do we expand nutrition or keep it as a watching brief?

As human nutrition is such a huge area, but the impacts of livestock livelihoods on human nutrition so under-researched to date, could we explore innovative ways of working closer with the few experts in this area, and attracting some young people into this field?
My view would be to keep it as a watching brief, but to be aware of where other work (eg diseases in the human food chain) touches on nutrition.

It’s not obvious how much ILRI should really get into human nutrition issues. So many others are there already.

More research in food and nutrition should be done, particularly for its gender relevance

Is there any advantage in separating animal health from human health aspects and concentrating in separate units?

Not if the emphasis is on zoonoses. But working on zoonoses only won’t touch enough on animal diseases like CBPP or ECF. I’d suggest that the emphasis for “grouping people” be on the skills and the approaches (eg epidemiology, diagnostics, participatory methods, economics), not on the discipline.

This begs the question of whether separating the kinds of research conducted, as we do now?—e.g., technical interventions are conducted mostly by biotech groups, institutional/social interventions are conducted mostly by markets groups, capacity building interventions mostly by BecA—remains useful, or should we mix these groups up for better synergies, quicker benefits . . .

Advantage depends on what synergy there is. In my view synergy is best realised when working towards common objectives. Whereas the underlying health or population medicine skills are often similar, the objectives of animal and human health work are different up to a point: non-zoonotic animal health can be directly linked to a farm productivity index but human health linkage to that is more tenuous, and may only apply if there was is a higher level objective (perhaps some common value chain improvement or livelihood index).So advantage will depend on clarifying what the common objectives are.

How do we get more people-power: post-docs, collaborations, sabbaticals. . .?

By walking the talk (e.g., ‘human resources are our most important resources’), especially when that is particularly hard to do. By hiring more ‘star power’ that will attract more early-career scientists to ILRI.

By hiring/contracting superb science communicators (either scientists with demonstrable communication skills or communicators with ability to find and tell great science stories) who can inject science issues into public affairs.

By assembling a group of high-quality editorial resources for scientists to employ. By taking more risks in innovating ways for scientists with proven track records to work with or for us.

Offer a great place for those individuals (recruited from all parts of the world) to advance their own science while contributing to a bigger picture. Working at ILRI has to count positively for their own career progression as well as for the greater good.

How do we best connect to get team like activities across all the different parts of ILRI – MGL, BT, BecA, regions, RMG, CAST. . .?

By making someone in each of these groups responsible for cross-cutting communications through social media, etc. By providing strong disincentives for any communications staff to work solely in and for her or his group. By providing a regular institutional physical event for scientific get-togethers. By improving video-conferencing for more regular high-quality get-togethers.

I wonder if it could help to have a person whose role is to connect the teams / parts of ILRI. Group-specific people responsible for inter-disciplinary communication/activity may not know or have time to explore all possibilities, so they may need to contact a person who centralise the information and has the overall and updated view of the different groups/parts of ILRI?

There is enough e-connecting already at ILRI. Get the right mix of people to meet physically and talk/share ideas. This should be a regular and expected part of people’s jobs. Down with the silos.

How could we get more, or to better bring out the ‘wow’ factor of ILRI’s existing work?

But the biggest thing I see to get out of the way is our own disbelief that we have wow factors! While not wanting to over-sell ourselves and what we do, we often go the opposite direction and under-sell ourselves — or, even worse, criticize the work of staff in other departments. Speaking as a communicator, I don’t know of a single bit of ILRI’s research that doesn’t have a wow factor in it. But 9 times out of 10, the wow aspect of the research is not even mentioned by scientists, other than in passing. I think we have to train ourselves to look for the stats, analogies, metaphors, etc., that enable us to attract global attention to the issues we, and some 1 billion-plus poor people, are dealing with.

Is there any advantage in separating animal health from human health aspects and concentrating in separate units?