What happens when experts stop performing solo and start playing in an orchestra?
Every musician brings something different to the performance. Their individual excellence matters. But the music only emerges when they play together.
The University of the Free State (UFS) is creating a space where research can work much the same way.
On 19 August 2026, the university will host its inaugural Multi-, Inter-, and Transdisciplinary Research Conference, bringing together researchers from every faculty, alongside leading scholars from all over South Africa, to explore how cross-disciplinary collaboration can help address some of society's most complex challenges.
Guided by the theme Bridging Barriers, Forging Futures, the conference marks a new institutional platform for research that connects expertise, perspectives, and lived experience in pursuit of meaningful societal impact.
Research beyond disciplinary boundaries
Many of today's challenges – from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence, food security, and social inequality – cannot be fully understood or solved by a single discipline alone.
The conference provides a university-wide forum where disciplinary expertise is placed in productive conversation with other forms of knowledge, methods, and experience.
Prof Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation, and Postgraduate Studies, says: “The future will not be shaped by disciplines working in parallel, but by knowledge working in concert. The most important research questions of our time do not simply recognise faculty boundaries. If our challenges are interconnected, our scholarship must be too.”
A different kind of conference
Unlike traditional academic conferences where presentations often run in parallel within disciplines, this inaugural conference adopts a plenary format.
Researchers from Law, Health Sciences, Education, The Humanities, Theology and Religion, Economic and Management Sciences, and Natural and Agricultural Sciences will share work addressing human development, technological innovation, health, education, biodiversity, housing, climate adaptation, governance, and community well-being.
The programme also highlights the value of bringing academic research into conversation with policymakers, practitioners, communities, and other partners beyond the university.
From collaboration to public value
The conference aims to strengthen scholarly exchange across the UFS, identify shared problems, questions, methods, and responsibilities, and stimulate collaborations that generate knowledge with public value.
It also invites participants to consider how research can move beyond publication to influence policy, practice, and meaningful social impact.
One highlight will be the opening keynote by internationally recognised clinician-scientist Prof Glenda Gray, titled From HIV to COVID-19: Building Transdisciplinary Research Capacity for Pandemic Response in Africa.
Drawing on three decades of HIV research, her address will demonstrate how scientific capacity developed for one public health challenge became part of the foundation for Africa's response to another.
“Prof Glenda Gray's journey from HIV research to pandemic preparedness exemplifies the power of collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and sectors,” Prof Reddy says.
Research that responds to society
For the University of the Free State, the conference is intended to be more than just a new event on the academic calendar.
It represents an opportunity to foster research that is contextually grounded, ethically responsible, and responsive to the realities of the Free State, South Africa, and the African continent.
It also reflects the university's commitment to creating knowledge that moves beyond disciplines and publication to influence policy, practice, and positive societal change.
For Prof Hester C. Klopper, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Free State, the significance of the conference will ultimately lie in what follows from it.
“The true success of this conference will not be measured by today’s presentations alone. It will be measured by the collaborations, ideas, and research that grow from them,” Prof Klopper says.
What follows from the conference
As in an orchestra, every instrument retains its unique voice. But when those voices come together with a shared purpose, they create something far more powerful than any could alone.
For Prof Reddy, “universities create their greatest value when they convene diverse forms of expertise around shared societal challenges. The strength of an orchestra lies not in its individual instruments, but in their ability to create something extraordinary together. The same is true of impactful research.”