Crossdisciplinary research plays a major role in addressing many problems of
intellectual and societal importance. We describe a framework to characterize such
projects that replaces "discipline "by "intellectual skills." We applied this framework to
study 40 National Science Foundation-sponsored projects. We found that the
intellectual skills varied widely among projects in depth, range, andform. Contrary to
the conventional wisdom, we found that many academic departments were "open" to
broad ranging skill acquisition and use. Unfortunately our evidence found NSF peer
review processes unfavorably disposed to multiskill projects. Lastly, we discuss
various approaches to organizing and practicing such research.
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