Project funded by

• Principal Investigator (PI), Seed Fund UC-UNSW 2024 (2025-2026). Joint PI: Pavel Krivistky

• Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI), ANID/FONDECYT program N°1220560 (2022-2025). PI: Julien Vanhulst. Webpage: https://sna-ssla.netlify.app/ 

Title of the project: 

"Sustainability Science in Practice: From Global Challenges to Interdisciplinary Collaboration"

Sustainability science exemplifies modern interdisciplinary research, addressing complex challenges like climate change through collaboration across diverse fields. Its institutional origins stem from milestones such as the World Conservation Strategy (1980), the Brundtland Report (1987), and subsequent global summits that emphasised the role of science in advancing socio-ecological sustainability. Despite significant progress, urgent challenges—including biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, and social inequalities—highlight the need for science to confront these crises ethically and effectively. Interdisciplinary research (IDR) has proven instrumental in bridging disciplinary divides, fostering innovation, and addressing societal challenges. However, while the science of science has extensively studied formal channels of communication, informal interactions—daily exchanges, advice networks, and collaborative dynamics—remain underexplored.

This study investigates the informal social networks of researchers at three interdisciplinary centres for sustainability science in Latin America: Mexico, Uruguay, and Chile. Integrating survey data with bibliometric records aims to uncover how informal communication networks influence scientific productivity and innovation. This pilot project will combine digital and survey-based insights, contributing to both academic understanding and practical applications.

Combining heterogeneous data about relations presents a number of methodological challenges: from modelling statistical dependence between different relationships measured using different instruments to rigorously accounting for sampling effects. Statistical techniques to address these challenges invariably present computational challenges of their own.

The findings will serve as a foundation for broader comparative analyses, identifying shared patterns across research centres globally; and the methodology and software tools developed in process will enable researchers worldwide to study similar phenomena in their own domains. Publication of software tools will also make this case study replicable and, eventually, reproducible.

Both the substantive results and the methodological developments will pave the way for future research funded by organisations such as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and the National Science Foundation. Ultimately, this research seeks to enhance the practice of sustainability science by illuminating the vital role of informal networks in interdisciplinary collaboration.

• Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI), ANID/FONDECYT program N°1220560 (2022-2025). PI: Julien Vanhulst. Webpage: https://sna-ssla.netlify.app/ 

Cantililán, Roberto; Vanhulst, Julien; Espinosa-Rada, Alejandro; Velazquez-Quiroz, Roberto. "Detecting Knowledge Communities and Their Hierarchies in Sustainability Science.".

Vanhulst, Julien; Espinosa-Rada, Alejandro; Padilla, Patricio-Navarro. "Defining the Scientific Network of Sustainability Science: A Systematic Review".

Velazquez-Quiroz, Roberto; Vanhulst, Julien; Espinosa-Rada, Alejandro; Cantillán, Roberto. "Interdiscipline as Language. A Structural Topic Model Approach to Sustainability Science’s Academic Production.".