FRANKE PROGRAM IN SCIENCE & THE HUMANITIES AT YALE

As the current director of the inter-disciplinary The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, Natarajan has organized a new series of monthly Ideas Salons that consist of inter-disciplinary conversations amongst the faculty and a distinguished speaker series that has brought several artists, writers, scientists and thought leaders as speakers to campus every semester. She has also expanded the cohort of inter-disciplinary Franke research fellows to include undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows at Yale who are engaged in unique projects that span disciplinary boundaries.

Mapping as Knowing  Our current intellectual theme is Mapping as Knowing that interrogates the process of mapping, its epistemic purposes and its limits. The on-going inter-disciplinary speaker series will culminate in a workshop (to be held at Yale in 2021 or 22) and curation of an exhibition of maps (2023). A new theme that we plan to initiate in 2021 is a project on epistemology and the goal is to understand the nature of inference – correlation and causation in modeling and making sense of the physical world (2021 – 2023).

 Learning by Doing  In collaboration with MIT Full Steam Ahead  we are crowd-sourcing simple experiments (videos) that teach important concepts to K-12 students creatively. Our goal is to curate 100 experiments that will inspire kids to be curious and actively engage with the natural world and learn.