Scientific discovery and innovation present enormous benefits and challenges for society including how we contribute to the health of our species, improve quality of life, drive economic growth, and protect our planet for future generations.
Claremont McKenna College’s new Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences will prepare our graduates with the competencies and skills that are required to engage with these rapidly evolving challenges, and their impacts on society, over the course of their careers. Our program will directly contribute to CMC’s mission to prepare students for thoughtful, productive lives and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions through several key commitments:
- Science in the public sphere. Our courses, research, and extramural programs are grounded in problems that are in service to the public sphere and, as such, will involve collaborations with the broader CMC community including its departments, centers, and institutes. In particular, our curricula have a strong emphasis on writing and communication.
- Integration of the sciences: Our curricula emphasize the strong connections and recurring themes across scientific disciplines, providing our graduates with the confidence to work on new problems that do not fit neatly in traditional disciplinary silos.
- Integration of computing and data science in the curriculum. Every CMC student learns the foundations of programming, data visualization, statistics, and machine learning in the "Codes of Life" course. They will use these tools both as vehicles for hands-on scientific discovery and as foundational literacy to be applied in many other fields such as economics and public policy.
- Experiential learning. Our students work collaboratively on discovery-based projects in their coursework and through research experiences in faculty labs, as early as the freshman year. In conjunction with CMC’s departments, centers, institutes, and labs, as well as The Soll Center, new research and internship programs continue to be developed.
- A culture of inclusion. The department fosters an environment that is inviting to all students, regardless of their prior background or their predisposition to the sciences.
The department’s programs are organized around three major grand challenges related to the health of our species, our brains, and our planet: respectively, (i) Genomics, Systems Biology, and Health (GSH), (ii) Brain, Learning, and Decision (BLD), and (iii) Climate, Energy, and the Environment (CEE). These three priorities interrelate with one another and provide opportunities for important intersections with the study of psychological sciences, economics and business, government and policy, philosophy and ethics, and other disciplines at CMC. Collectively, our faculty have the breadth of scientific expertise and multi-disciplinary approaches that will allow us to evolve our programs as new challenges arise in the decades ahead.
Department News
Recent publications by KDIS faculty. Professor Lars Schmitz, Kravis Associate Professor of Integrated Sciences, has co-authored a new article that was published in Current Biology, entitled "The rise of pelagic sharks and adaptive evolution of pectoral fin morphology during the Cretaceous". Professor Zeynep Enkavi, Assistant Professor of Integrated Sciences, has co-authored a new article that was published in Science Data, entitled "Cognitive tasks, anatomical MRI, and functional MRI data evaluating the construct of self-regulation." Professor David Nembhard, Director of Applied Science Programs, has co-authored a new article in Applied Ergonomics, entitled "Cognitive and behavorial markers for human detection error in AI-assisted bridge inspection.
The KDIS faculty and staff warmly welcome the CMC class of 2028, the first cohort of students with access to the new Integrated Sciences major. Over 80 students are enrolled in our "Codes of Life" course this fall where they are using laboratory and computational methods to study antimicrobial resistance and strategies to combat diseases that are resistant to current drugs, design their own experiments, and make their own discoveries. Our students are also engaging in research and reading groups with our faculty, organizing science activities and clubs, and participating in the department's efforts to recruit the next cohort of KDIS faculty.
Jonathan Wise ’25: Building tech skills and personal relationships as a Data Science major
Jonathan Wise ’25
Data Science major with Leadership Sequence
CMC earns large NSF grant for high-powered research equipment
A powerful, high-performance computing (HPC) cluster that will significantly expand computational capacity and facilitate advanced research across several disciplines, will soon arrive on Claremont McKenna College’s campus, thanks to a $918,485 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the Nation
Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences offers new opportunities
As the new academic year begins, the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences (KDIS) continues to reach important milestones.