The Transdisciplinary Studies Program at CGU enables university scholars to explore, collaborate, and innovate around society’s most complex issues. We offer scholars opportunities to construct, blend, and transcend traditional academic fields so they may shape their scholarship and practice beyond disciplinary boundaries to create equitable and positive futures.
“The emergence of transdisciplinarity … signalled the need for new syntheses at a time of growing fragmentation of knowledge and culture. New synthetic frameworks emerged, including general systems, post/structuralism, feminist theory, and sustainability. … Broadly speaking, though, emphasis is shifting from traditional epistemology to problem solving, from the pre-given to the emergent, and from universality to hybridity and contextuality.“
Transdisciplinary work addresses complex, contextually-bound problems with many actors, perspectives, and needs. For universities to best connect to the larger world, disciplinary and academic boundaries must be transcended and re-imagined. Transdisciplinary approaches and frameworks emphasize mindsets for systems, complexity, community, and common ground, collaboration across disciplines, sectors, institutions, and stakeholders in pursuit of re-imagined solutions to complex, wicked, world problems.
Now Accepting Applications for the 2026 Research Symposium
Participate in the Realizing Equity Research Symposium!
Join Us on Friday, April 10, 2026!
Held annually, this symposium showcases research for positive social transformation from students committed to scholarship in equity and justice. The planning committee encourages presentation proposals from all academic disciplines. Presentations can be individual projects or group collaborations.
Applications for the 2026 Symposium are due on Sunday, February 01, 2026, by 11:59PM (midnight pacific)
Crossing Boundaries? Integrating Multiple Disciplines?
We offer two competitive fellowship awards for scholarly projects that blend, transcend, and transgress disciplinary boundaries, and those that cross disciplines, institutions, and sectors in search of solutions to complex problems.
How do you effect real change? Integrate your authentic self with a degree for world-building with our Masters in Transdisciplinary Analysis
The MA in Transdisciplinary Analysis is a degree program for shaping positive change. When you take on a transdisciplinary challenge, you expand your imagination and creativity to build positive futures.
Whether we are scientists, artists, humanists, or entrepreneurs, real change requires us to embrace uncertainty and seek answers with a different set of eyes and tools. Complex problems call for new ways of thinking.
The Transdisciplinary Program at Claremont Graduate University was founded in 2002, made possible by a generous gift from Trustee Dr. George Kozmetsky and his wife Ronya Kozmetsky.
Take a Transdisciplinary (TNDY) Course
Led by faculty from different disciplines, we offer a number of innovative and unique courses that allows students to collaborate and innovate around society’s most complex issues.
Tailor to Your Interests, Save Time and Costs
Build a dual or interfield degree with time and cost savings. We can help you integrate two different disciplinary degree programs by connecting program requirements with your interests and career plans while saving you time and lowering the cost of earning your degree.
We embrace the creative potential and integration that blending, transcending, and re-imagining disciplinary/departmental boundaries, perspectives, and research can provide a university.