History and Mission:

The STS Initiative began in 2006, with the recognition that VCU’s wealth of programs and resources —ranging from the VCU School of Medicine to the School of the Arts to the new Ph.D. in Media, Art, and Text—has made it uniquely well-positioned to create an interdisciplinary program that integrates medical and science Ph.D. students, as well as science, humanities, and social science undergraduates.  As with VCU Life Sciences, our goal is to educate future generations to think broadly about their work, not just across disciplines within science but also across C.P. Snow’s ‘two culture’ divide.

The primary target audience for our program is engineers, scientists, and doctors, and health professionals in training and undergraduate or graduate students of the humanities and social sciences who seek to become scientifically literate citizens.  The STS Initiative is committed to exploring science itself as a complex social system, embedded in a diverse array of cultural contexts, both nationally and internationally. It would give prominence to the concepts of “Complexity” and “Whole-systems-thinking” – both important concepts embraced by recent scholarly and educational trends in the sciences, at the graduate and undergraduate levels.



Director’s Biography

Assistant Director’s Biography