On 11 December 2025 LINAS brought together its Doctoral Scholars for a cross-cohort panel event designed to foreground interdisciplinarity in practice.  Building on the success of last year’s Christmas panel, the event offered an opportunity for scholars at different stages of their PhD to share their work and reflect on points of connection across disciplines.

The panel was structured in two rounds.  In the first, each Scholar gave a concise 1–2 minute overview of their research (or planned research for first-year students).  This was followed by a second reflective round, where panellists responded to two prompts: identifying whose work most closely related to their own and highlighting any particularly striking or impressive contributions they had heard.  The format encouraged active listening, mutual recognition, and interdisciplinary engagement.

We found out that, in our cohort, disciplinary boundaries are far more porous than they might first appear.  Discussions revealed how our scholars studying physics can still relate to and utilise psychological models of perception and behaviour in their research; how legal research is deeply entangled with social science questions about power, inequality, and governance; and how English literature can speak directly to computer science through shared concerns with language, narrative, and meaning making.  Instead of neat disciplinary silos often seen at conferences, the panel highlighted overlapping questions in the world of AI.

Overall, the panel showcased the breadth of research within LINAS while reinforcing the programme’s core ethos that meaningful interdisciplinary work about some of the most exciting advancements emerges through dialogue, curiosity, and shared reflection across disciplinary boundaries.

Find out more about LINAS and the Doctoral Scholars here.