Dr. Julie Thompson Klein is Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan (U.S.A.). Holder of a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon, Dr. Klein is past president of the Association for Integrative Studies (AIS) and former editor of the AIS journal, Issues in Integrative Studies. Her books include Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (l990), Interdisciplinary Studies Today (co-edited, 1994), Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996), Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society (co-edited, 2001), Interdisciplinary Education in K-12 and College (edited, 2002), the monograph Mapping Interdisciplinary Studies (1999), and Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (2005). She is also author of the forthcoming book Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures, Associate Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Interdisciplinarity, and author of numerous book chapters and journal articles.
Klein has received both national and international awards and invitations. She was elected to the Wayne State University Academy of Scholars and is a recipient of the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Graduate Mentor Award, the Board of Governor's Distinguished Faculty Award, and the Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Fellowship. She also won the final prize in the Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation's international competition for new research models, for her essay Applying Interdisciplinary Models to Design, Planning, and Policy Making, and received the Kenneth Boulding Award for outstanding scholarship on interdisciplinarity. In addition, she has represented the United States at an OECD-sponsored international symposium on interdisciplinarity in Sweden and at UNESCO-sponsored symposia on transdisciplinarity in Portugal and in France. In 1997-98, she was Senior Fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), and in Fall 2008 she was an invited Visiting Fellow in the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.
Klein consults widely throughout North America. In addition to helping numerous colleges and universities develop interdisciplinary programs, she was a member of AACU's first national Task Force on Interdisciplinary Studies, served as a consultant for AACU's Asheville Institute on General Education, and was a member of AACU's national task force on Integrative Learning. From 1997 to 2000, Klein was a Member of the national Academic Assembly Council of The College Board, and from 1999 to 2000 served as a Member of the Association for Integrative Studies Task Force on Accreditation. In addition, she advised the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies of Science, and the National Science Foundation on interdisciplinary research and education.
Klein is active internationally as well. In l978-79 she was Visiting Foreign Professor at Shimane University in Matsue, Japan; in l987, a Fulbright Lecturer at Tribhuvan University in Nepal; in 1991, an Academic Specialist sponsored by the United States Information Agency in Kathmandu; and, in 1995, a Foundation Visitor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. In addition, she has spoken on interdisciplinarity in Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Australia, and Russia; and served as invited member of the planning board for the Swiss National Science Foundation's international conference on transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability in 2000. More recently, she has served as a member of the Academy of Finland's Integrative Research team in Helsinski, a member of the (US) National Academies of Science task force on modernizing the National Science Foundation's taxonomy for classifying fields of science and engineering, and an advisor to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on evaluation of inter- and transdisciplinary research.
