A leader in fostering research that successfully breaks down barriers between academic disciplines, Associate Professor Cynthia Mitchell from UTS's Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF), is being honoured this month by a Swedish university.

The Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg will award Professor Mitchell an honorary doctorate in engineering on 12 May for her work in developing academic quality criteria for transdisciplinary research – in the environmental field and for postgraduate education in general.

Announcing the award the Swedish university described Professor Mitchell as a "multi-awarded researcher" who is "actively engaged in debates about the role of engineers in the path towards a sustainable society."

Professor Mitchell, who is a Research Director of the ISF, currently holds an Associate Fellowship with the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education to investigate ways and means of fostering, encouraging, and evaluating quality in transdisciplinary postgraduate research.

She is developing a framework that will "give confidence to supervisors, examiners and students about evaluating the rigour and relevance of transdisciplinary research."

"Increasingly, the problems that face society require approaches that do more than bring the outputs of different disciplines together," Professor Mitchell said. "Sustainable solutions require approaches that transcend disciplines and increasingly, research students are engaged in such problems.

"The issue for universities is that the existing discipline-specific methods of supervising and assessing the quality of research are inadequate when solutions require synergistic collaboration between science, engineering, business, the humanities and so on.

"The criteria for assessing a thesis vary both within and between disciplines: the sciences are quite different to say, the social sciences, so what do you do with a piece of research that combines a scientific or environmental engineering study with work on social outcomes? How do supervisors and examiners span the divide themselves, and guide their students in developing the skills to do the same?

"To develop a sufficient depth of expertise in a new field takes time. For transdisciplinary scholars, this difficulty is heightened by the pressure from the Federal Government to reduce the time taken to complete postgraduate degrees.

"The ISF exemplifies the tension that surrounds transdisciplinary research within existing universities. The institute is outside the UTS faculty structure and undertakes short-term, externally funded research contracts that advance our mission of creating change towards sustainable futures.

"We seek to produce outcomes in three realms: firstly, the problem itself, for example, through changes in policy or investment decisions; secondly, the body of knowledge, for example, through journal articles; and finally, the stakeholders around the problem, for example, through shifts in their perspectives.

"Our ISF postgraduate student research topics range from improving the conditions for landless farmers in Bangladesh to the analysis of climate policy in Australia."

Working with a range of collaborators Professor Mitchell is looking to define research quality processes that supervisors, students and graduate schools can promote and use.