Who We Are

My academic training and career have always bridged fields, and I am passionate about bridge-building across academic lines. As an undergraduate student, I studied Japanese classical literature alongside the biological nature of addiction; as a graduate student, I applied oscillation theory to the study of neural circuits for my dissertation; and as a medical science educator, I taught neuroanatomy through the lenses of philosophy and art. At CGU, I am excited to facilitate opportunities, tools and spaces for boundary-crossing and collaboration, serving as associate provost and director of the Transdisciplinary Studies program.

I came to transdisciplinary studies by way of “inter-professionalism”—a way of applying and integrating knowledge from diverse healthcare practitioners for improved, patient-centered care. As a basic scientist in medical education, I saw that integrating different knowledge domains, including across cognitive, situated, and embodied knowledges, was necessary for interprofessional success. Transdisciplinarity provides the theoretical basis and practical foundation for this kind of integration. At CGU, transdisciplinarity is in our DNA.

I consider myself lucky to be at an elite and unique institution where transdisciplinarity is a core value. By continuing to grow in our transdisciplinary culture, I know we can also grow as an impactful, socially responsible leader in higher education. Our program is here to help our community transcend and transform itself through boundary-crossing and collaboration. It is my hope that through these processes, and through building bridges across disciplines, CGU’s scholars will expand to an even greater potential for making positive change in our world.

I have been a transdisciplinarian and an inveterate boundary-crosser pretty much all my life starting in a home, a global family, and a country – Malaysia – that reveled and struggled and grew in the interactions between religions, cultures, stories, and ways of thinking and being.

In school, I was in the Science and Mathematics stream but continued my love affair with literature, storytelling, and the arts in parallel. At the National University of Singapore, being part of the Arts and Social Science faculty (by which they mean department), allowed me to integrate Literary studies including post-colonial and feminist literature, Linguistics and Social Anthropology, Pedagogy, and Philosophy.

The pathways to much of my boundary crossing—and teaching-learning disruptions for transformation—have been semiotics, complexity, and the creative process. Sense-making, in all its embodied and shared forms, and the creative, mindful capacities to work in complex adaptive ways are integral to education, research, and world practice. This forms the core of my scholarship and practice – developing creative curriculum for literacy at all ages using the arts, mime and drama work, integrating arts-based methods into STEM subjects, and using creative, complexity facilitation in leader development. Especially doing this with creative, passionate, co-conspirators. These are my happy spaces!

At CGU, I founded and developed our unique Preparing Future Faculty program in 2013 based on transdisciplinary principles that go beyond teaching professional development to foster teacher-scholar identities and methods for transforming teaching and learning.

I continue this work as Director of Transdisciplinary Curriculum and Special Projects to expand transdisciplinary pedagogy in creating TNDY programs and initiatives – formal and informal – that realize CGU’s transdisciplinary mission to lead transformative education. As part of this process, I oversee The STEAM Journal, a transdisciplinary open-access journal to share boundary-crossing conversations and work between the sciences and the arts. My goal is to provide connective and integrative opportunities for students to enter reflexive, mind and heart opening journeys that help them become transdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners who seek positive impacts in a complex and emergent world.

Richard has worked as a video store and appliance store clerk, auto body technician, ski lift operator, certified alpine ski instructor, and AP US, European, and World History tutor. Richard also worked as an adjunct instructor for CGU’s School for Arts and Humanities digital humanities program. From 2013 to 2016, Richard worked as the project manager, researcher, and web developer for the Power Struggles project―funded by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation―under former CGU Research Associate Professor, Hal T. Nelson, before taking his current position as assistant director of the Transdisciplinary Studies Program.

Richard comes to transdisciplinarity by way of his disparate work history, his fascination with the complexity and expansiveness of history, and his interest in how diverse disciplinary experiences can help us, collectively, cross boundaries to tackle wicked problems and tell new stories.