Bridging disciplines, academics, and industry: lessons from years of trying, Nancy Baym
Watch the recording of the 2025 Digital Good Network annual keynote. Nancy Baym, Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research, gave a talk on overcoming the challenges of interdisciplinary working.
About the talk
It’s easy to hold up ‘interdisciplinarity’ as desirable, as is seeking to bridge universities, industries, and other sorts of organisations. But as people who’ve tried often find, the practice of making such bridges function well is far harder than expressing the intent. In this talk, Nancy will identify some of the less obvious barriers and suggests some of the ways they can be overcome. She draws on her experiences as a member of a highly multidisciplinary research lab in industry that seeks to spark interdisciplinary collaboration in close collaboration with academics. She also draws
on her experience of co-founding and organising the Association of Internet Researchers.
About the speaker
Nancy Baym
Partner Research Manager, Microsoft Research
Nancy Baym is a Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research. Her research concerns social dynamics of new communication technologies. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2012, she was a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her books include Twitter: A Biography (co-authored with Jean Burgess, 2020, NYU) and Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (2018, NYU).
She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its second president. She has been recognized with the Frederick Williams Prize for Contributions to the Study of Communication and Technology awarded by the International Communication Association, the naming of the Nancy Baym Book Award by the Association of Internet Researchers, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg.